Protecting the environment while drilling

In 1999, the US Department of Energy (DOE) issued a report titled Environmental Benefits of Advanced Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Technology . After an extensive review of exploration and production technologies developed in the past decade or two, the DOE found numerous environment benefits from these technologies. Examples cited in the DOE report include the following.

• Technology provides access to oil and gas resources that are beneath sensitive areas, such as the wetlands, with minimal effect on the environment.
• To avoid potential harm during platform installation and decommissioning, the industry conducts area surveys before and during operations to assure that no endangered species or large marine mammals are in the area.
• In the Arctic, companies build ice roads and ice drilling pads to conduct their operations. These structures melt away in the spring, leaving no sign that they ever existed.
• Companies have substantially reduced the amount of land disturbance required for drilling a well, and by drilling several wells from a single location (with directional or multilateral technology) fewer sites are required to achieve the same level of production.
• When drilling in an area that was home to a grizzly bear population, one company restricted human access by using remote telemetry technology to monitor the wellhead, controlled hours of road use, drilled only during the winter months, and installed muffling devices on certain pieces of equipment to reduce noise. Many other examples of modifying operations to protect certain species were cited.
• If drilling operations are unsuccessful, companies plug the well below the surface with cement, then re-contour and re-vegetate the surface as nearly as possible to pre-drilling conditions (as required by landowners and state or federal agencies, who often must approve the company's completion of restoration activities). In many cases, within a very short period of time, it is virtually impossible to tell that a well was ever drilled in an area.

While these examples are from the United States, the same technologies are used to produce similar benefits in other parts of the world. For more information, view this video on directional drilling .