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Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

University of Arkansas

Low Impact Natural Gas and Oil Exploration and Production

LINGO Exploration and Production

The oil and gas industry has made great strides in protecting the environment while increasing natural gas production in the U.S. However, producers face daunting challenges to effectively produce more natural gas in environmentally sensitive areas. As a member of the University/National Labs Alliance and in partnership with the University of Arkansas' Department of Chemical Engineering and Argonne National Laboratory, CAST has developed both a private online geospatial risk management decision support system and a public educational website to help meet these challenges.

Probabilistic Risk Based Decision Support for Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Facilities in Sensitive Ecosystems

The Fayetteville Shale play is an unconventional natural gas play across central Arkansas. It is a tight formation and requires fracturing to produce economic quantities of gas.  Initial estimates are that it may rival the Barnett Shale play in Texas. Currently there are about two million acres under lease in this play.  It is anticipated that thousands of wells will be drilled during the next several years; this will entail installation of massive support infrastructure of roads and pipelines, as well as drilling fluid disposal pits and infrastructure to handle millions of gallons of fracturing fluids.  This project is focused on gas production in Arkansas as the test bed for application of proactive risk management decision support system for natural gas exploration and production.

CAST and the University of Arkansas' Department of Chemical Engineering, with funding from the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (via the LINGO initiative), have developed the Infrastructure Placement Analysis System (IPAS), a web-based geospatial decision support system that will allow mid- and small-sized exploration and production companies to generate development plans for resource extraction in sensitive ecosystems in a manner that will meet regulatory requirements and proactively minimize risks to the ecosystem. IPAS is a geographic information system (GIS)-based, risk-management tool that enables an operator to evaluate alternative lease layouts and thus manage site-specific environmental concerns in advance.  The system also allows operators and regulators to more easily share site-specific information related to the layout.

Fayetteville Shale: Reducing the Environmental Impact of Natural Gas Development

A second focus of the LINGO award was the development of a public information site. This site, developed along side Argonne National Laboratory, is a web resource on natural gas development in Arkansas' Fayetteville Shale formation where you can learn about the natural gas resources available in the Fayetteville Shale formation in Arkansas. The site explains the steps followed by natural gas development companies, from gaining access to the land through sending the gas to the marketplace. For each step in the process, the site provides information about the state and federal regulatory requirements that developers must follow. The site also describes some of the technologies that can be used to minimize the environmental impacts of natural gas development.  An interactive map of the Fayetteville Shale Play is available and show current information on drill pad location. issued permits and well-by-well production.  

Environmentally Friendly Drilling Program

Though our work with LINGO, CAST has forged relationships with other important players in this field.  The Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) and its partners offer options to reduce the impact of O&G operations in environmentally sensitive ecosystems. The Environmentally Friendly Drilling (EFD) program combines new low-impact technologies that reduce the footprint of drilling activities, integrates light weight drilling rigs with reduced emission engine packages, addresses on-site waste management, optimizes the systems to fit the needs of a specific development sites and provides stewardship of the environment. In addition project includes industry, the public, environmental organizations, and elected officials in a collaboration that addresses concerns on development of unconventional natural gas resources in environmentally sensitive areas. Partners have regional expertise that they are able to bring together in a synergistic manner to address the needs across the country.

Contact:

Greg Thoma
Deparemtn of Chemical Engineering
479.575.7374, Turn on JavaScript!

Jackson Cothren
Department of Geosciences
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies
479.263.3911, Turn on JavaScript!