A pronghorn antelope trots across a Wyoming well pad operated by PureWest.
The question of ESG considerations and how to set and meet goals related to them has consumed a rising portion of planning and operating time and budgets within energy companies for at least 15 years now. No one expects the emphasis on these environmental, social and governance considerations to diminish as time goes on, especially as they relate to emissions of both methane and carbon dioxide.
In fact, with a rising percentage of energy consuming customers insisting upon ensuring any oil and natural gas they purchase and consume is certified as having been responsibly produced, the reasonable expectation is that the issue will continue to grow in importance. This reality has incentivized producing companies to not only strive to identify innovative means of improving their operations and internal processes, but also to become more transparent in the ways they report their results.
One operator that has taken the goal of reporting transparency to a new level is Wyoming’s largest natural gas producer, PureWest Energy, LLC. As part of the digital version of its 2022 Sustainability Report released on December 9, PureWest includes an interactive tool that allows readers to view well pads, emissions monitoring technology, groundwater sampling, and other relevant aspects of its operations.
“For so many years, our industry has been very close to the vest about how we do things, and while we’ve done the right things, we’ve always kept our head down and that’s not good enough anymore,” Kelly Bott, Sr. VP of ESG, Land and Regulatory at PureWest told me in a recent interview. “We really need to start building that trust and putting the information out there.”
PureWest’s CEO Chris Valdez agreed, noting that the installation of continuous monitoring technology in the field was an eye-opening experience for the company’s team to identify a number of instances in which they had been double-reporting some emissions. “Our emissions are very, very low,” Valdez told me, “and we went in with a healthy amount of skepticism around how much we would get out of these monitors in terms of leak detection. It was something that was very eye-opening as we put these continuous monitors in place.”
Illustration detailing emission sensors installed on one of the 400+ well pads operated by PureWest … [+]
As a result of all the process improvements and new technologies the company has adopted in recent years, PureWest has one of the industry’s lowest methane intensity rates nationally. Since 2020, the company’s Scope 1 emissions have declined by 26% even as its natural gas production has risen by 21%.
One benefit of this record on emissions and the ability to have its gas certified as responsibly produced under Project Canary’s process is the ability to sell it into the California market, which is becoming increasingly restrictive in this regard. “When we think about it, it’s really the voice of the customer that matters,” Valdez said. “We are fighting to put our molecules into California, the Pacific Northwest. If we don’t do these things, we will disadvantage ourselves. California is looking to adopt as much renewable natural gas as it can, but there’s not enough of that to go around. We have the next best available product, and we’re working to develop the market for certified gas.”
PureWest’s status as a large producer on federal lands in Wyoming is also a key factor in the company’s dedication to maximum transparency. Both Valdez and Bott emphasized the importance of treating their company’s relationship with the regional field office of the Bureau of Land Management not as an adversarial one, but as a partnership. “We’ve got a very active field office and we really look at it as a partnership,” Bott said. “Sharing all this information not only gives them visibility into our process, into our results, but also gives them some credit for the good work that they’ve done. There’s a lot of factors that have driven our success, and they really should get some of the credit.”
While emissions of both methane and carbon have received the lion’s share of the attention on the environmental piece of ESG in recent years, other considerations are also critical to success. Water is also a big key, and PureWest has been able to limit its consumption in recent years. In its Dec. 9 release, the company pointed out that it has used 100% recycled water for completions for more than a decade, and its 2021 freshwater withdrawals were 87% lower across all operations than in the prior five years.
It’s important to note that nothing about designing this process is simple. PureWest’s operations in Wyoming are highly complex, involving hundreds of locations of all shapes and sizes. “We’ve got something like 400 pads,” Bott said, “and they range from single well pads to our biggest pad that has 59 wells on it. So, we knew we would have to customize a program for each location.”
Initially, Bott says, “We were just inundated with information. We said, Oh my gosh, what do we do with all of this?” Another complicating factor, as it is for most producers of size in the Intermountain West, is that the company’s operations included wells drilled not just on federal lands, but a mix of contiguous private and state lands as well. Factor in considerations around migratory birds and mammals, endangered plant and animal species, historic and archaeological sites and noise and viewshed mitigations, and it all becomes quite a lot to manage and measure.
“One of the things I’ve been most proud of here is starting to get recognition for being an excellent operator on public lands,” Valdez said. “We’ve shown that you can operate on public lands and be a top performer on the environmental front.”
Considering all the planning, work and cost involved in getting to that point, it’s no wonder Valdez, Bott and the PureWest team want to tell the story in as transparent a way as possible.
