Apache has completed several wells on family property southwest of Toyah and another was “fast tracked” recently. The others have been completed for at least 3 months (that includes the fracking). Last month we saw our first royalty check and were happy with it - though we don’t have point of reference. It represented production from three wells in one unit. There is another unit on family property as well. My question is this. The royalties coding reflected natural gas production. As we understand, there is no pipeline completed in our specific area to provide transport. Does that mean this production was trucked, which doesn’t seem realistic for natural gas. I know each unit as a tank battery on it, but I was guessing the tank batteries were primarily for oil (which doesn’t make sense, since they are expecting very little oil from our wells). As you can tell, I am way out of my league in understanding the happenings in the modern oil field.
There has been some talk of well site compressors to truck away dry gas, but generally the only things trucked are oil, salt water, and NGLs.
My family has started seeing royalties from 5 of the wells drilled on family property. Another well is approved and we are told being expedited. We have not seen any production from a sixth well. Based on the royalties, it would be obvious they are not trucking natural gas. But by the same token we were lead to believe that the pipeline supporting our wells was not completed. Guessing we are wrong that assumption.
Sounds like they have the pipeline up and running, but that’s just my guess. Don’t know how they would economically transport dry gas otherwise.
Yep, just gas. Not a spit of crude in any of the reports.
Those recompressor stations on the wellsite pad and those tall slender tanks are for condensate and NGLs the compressors remove from the gas stream as they compress the gas in 4 stages up to line pressure of 900 PSI.
Some of those tanks have locked hatches and a vapor recovery unit on them that takes 6 ounces of positive gas pressure on the contents of the tank and compresses that to liquify it and return it to the liquid volume in the tank…then the liquids are transported by truck or pipeline market…or by rail if there’s an NGL rail loading terminal nearby.
So, if they’ve got vapor recovery units and recompressor stations on location with these gas wells, then WHY are they flaring gas? Simple. They flare gas because it’s cheaper than running a compressor as a vacuum pump to pull the internal pressure of the production stream tubing down and let the well barf up more water, fracking mud solids, as flowback to stimulate the well to ‘clear its throat’ and stabilize flow rate…whether that is natural gas or oil. Easy peasy…no?
,Reeves county, Tx 
