In my
Sunday column. I write about the potential for drilling for oil and natural gas on city property. The idea has been suggested as way to raise revenue to help pay for the city's monumental street improvement needs.
I talk in that column about some of the developments in the petroleum industry that make urban drilling acceptable. Gone are the days when oil exploration requires huge, smelly oil fields with enormous lakes of mud and filth.
Natural gas reserves in Fort Worth -- in the middle of downtown and literally under the airport -- have been developed by Oklahoma City's Chesapeake Energy without many people even noticing.
In the course of researching that story, I spoke with Tulsa oilman Dewey Barlett Jr. about the idea. I think he deserved most of the credit for it. The first I heard of it was in the Complete our Streets report, which he co-authored with Sharon King Davis.
Here are a couple of other points he made in our conversation that I didn't have room for in my column:
1. At the same time that the price of oil has skyrocketed, so has the cost of drilling. His company is doing some work near Perry. A well there would have cost about $350,000 to complete three or four years ago. Today, it costs closer to $750,000. The difference is equipment and labor costs.
Even at double the cost. There's still a lot of money to be made in Oklahoma petroleum, he said.
2. Oklahoma oil fields that were considered tapped out by 1920s standards, even by 1970s standards, have a good potential in the current market.
Turn-of-the-century exploration relied on the the pressure within the oil reserve to drive it to the surface. That resulted in capturing about 50 percent of the oil that was in the ground.
Later technology used water flooding techniques. That drove another 20 percent of the oil up.
But relatively new techniques use carbon dioxide to lower the viscosity of the crude, thus allowing more of it to be captured. Another 10 percent of the potential oil in the ground could be captured using that technique, he said.
That process has the double advantage of taking a gas that is considered a pollutant at the end of smokestacks and turn it into a saleable commodity, he said.
At $30 a barrel that process was cost-prohibitive. At $100 a barrel you can do a lot of wild things.
