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North Central US | North Dakota's Williston Basin here:
1. No. Most power for the NW corner of the state comes from the Coal mines by Beulah. Basin Electric, the REC's electricity generating co-op, is rapidly building natural gas generation stations as natural gas is basically a given away waste product off the wells, basically free electricity. The state mandates the capture of something like 90% of the gas, otherwise it would be flared off at the wellsite.
2. No, see reply above. Also, ask the people on Xcel or basically anyone in the Red River Valley where most of the REC's have pledged/contracted for a certain amount of wind energy. Their power is 10 to 15 cents more than ours plus they have on peak/off peak, we don't. Ours is about 6 cents. Most wind energy generated in ND is exported elsewhere.
3. Because REC or the equivalent is 10 cents or more per kwh cheaper. Also you only need something like 400 amps at most, the same as what comes into our farm to run an oil well. You're running a couple of electric motors, some pumps, and monitoring equipment. If you mean the drilling rig, that's a different story. There they run on a handful of big engines. The drilling rigs are completely independent. They make their own power, run all their pumps, winches, hydraulics, everything off their own engines. They do run generators on finished wells until REC gets there, they aren't much bigger than what we have for standby power here, but are ther phase.
4. Drilling rigs never stop, except for gas pockets and voids. The gas must be flared off to prevent an explosion, and they must have circulation for drilling so voids must be filled before they can keep going. Usually the voids are filled with salt water from other wells
5. Yes. It is the Yellowstone of the oilfield, and it is the talk of the oilfield as according to basically anyone in the industry, its quicker to name things they got right than what they got wrong, as there apparently isn't much they did get right.
Edited by GS2 12/22/2024 07:41
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