TPT July 2018

G LOBA L MARKE T P L AC E

The 50,000-pound truckloads of material required for horizontal drilling take their toll of the roads of rural Texas “Every month in the West Texas Permian Basin, energy producers drill hundreds of new long-lateral oil and gas wells, an increasing number of which reach 20,000ft in length and require the transportation of pipe, sand, water and oil weighing more than the Empire State Building.” Gabriel Collins, the Baker Botts Fellow in Energy & Environmental Regulatory Affairs at the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies, went on to explain why this matters for the sedimentary basin in the western part of the US state of Texas and the southeastern part of the state of New Mexico. Writing in Axios , Mr Collins noted that unconventional oil and gas development employing horizontal drilling and fracking, of the kind practiced in Texas, is dramatically more transportation-intensive than traditional models. The movement of such huge quantities of construction materials via truck has had a destructive effect on local roads. Mr Collins drew a comparison between the traditional (deep) and lateral (horizontal) methods. Drilling a single long-lateral well can now require more than 500 tons of steel pipe, a 14-football-fields-long string of sand-carrying railcars, and enough water to fill more than 35 Olympic-size swimming pools. He wrote, “The cumulative stress of moving so much mass over a concentrated set of asphalt roads in 50,000-pound (or heavier) truckloads causes enormous wear and tear that many rural counties cannot afford to repair.” (“Transport-Heavy Gas and Oil Production Is Destroying Texas Roads,” 4 May) This is not the only danger posed by heavy truck traffic, according to Mr Collins. In the core Permian Basin counties, the 2016 death rate on rural roads was nearly 25 per cent higher than it was in 2010, before the recent production boom kicked off. The local crash death rate is approximately twice the national average and on par with that of Russia – “a notoriously dangerous place to drive,” commented Mr Collins. › He observed that similar problems exist, at smaller scale, in nearly every US shale play, and did not appear to hold out much hope of alleviation. He did present what he called the bottom line: “At the least, energy producers should move as much water and oil as possible by pipeline to alleviate the strain that intensifying oilfield activity is putting on roads. Targeted taxes, fees and investment incentives may be required to discourage trucking and fund road repairs.”

Technology Robots are coming into their own as able par tners to the oil and gas offshore industry As reported by Tsvetana Paraskova on Oilprice.com , oil companies are turning to robots and drones to perform dangerous tasks in harsh offshore environments. “Those gadgets save costs and improve performance,” she wrote, and enhance safety precautions “by reducing the exposure of people to dangerous tasks and situations.” (“Robots And Drones Are Changing The Offshore Oil Industry,” 6 May) Ms Paraskova, who writes for the US consulting firm Divergente LLC, noted that, since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, “no company is keener than BP” to show that it takes safety extremely seriously. Among the British company’s arsenal of safety measures is a small robot, a “magnetic crawler” the size of a small dog, that inspects the Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf. The device is equipped with strong rare-earth magnets and a high- definition camera, its inspection capability complemented by drones with cameras that capture the smallest details. According to BP executives, such robots and drones can complete an inspection in roughly half the time it would take humans to perform the same task. Encouraged by the results of the pilot robot-drone programme at Thunder Horse, BP is considering similar programmes at its neighbouring Na Kika, Mad Dog and Atlantis platforms. Ms Paraskova also said that BP uses robots and drones at its Cherry Point refinery in Washington State. There, robots inspect such vessels as the hydrocracker reactor by means of ultrasound technology for spotting microscopic cracks in the vessel walls. Reportedly, robotic inspection has reduced to just one hour (from 23) the man-hours necessarily spent inside the hydrocracker unit during planned shutdowns. › European expedients noted by Ms Paraskova include the Oseberg H platform on the Norwegian continental shelf, the first unmanned wellhead platform to be installed by Equinor (formerly Statoil), which is also developing remote- controlled platforms for small and medium-sized platforms. Additionally, over the next 18 months France’s Total and the Oil & Gas Technology Centre of Aberdeen, Scotland, will test the world’s first autonomous offshore robot for operational inspection of facilities at theAlwyn platform as well as on Total’s onshore Shetland gas plant. The Technology Centre and Total are developing the robot with the Austrian manufacturer Taurob and TU Darmstadt University in Germany, which as a team won Total’s ARGOS (Autonomous Robots for Gas and Oil Sites) challenge in 2017.

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JULY 2018