Top Producing Natural Gas Well in Barnett Shale

Barnett Shale in Texas has one site that lives up to the "everything is bigger in Texas" reputation. The Chesapeake Energy-managed site is in Arlington, the city that houses the new Dallas Cowboy stadium. Gene Powell, publisher of Powell Barnett Shale Newsletter, reports that "Day Kimball Hill #A1" is producing more than 14,000 or so wells in Barnett Shale. The determination comes from looking at the average daily production in one month's time.

"Put another way, if the average U.S. home uses about 73,000 cubic feet of natural gas a year to heat and cook (so says American Gas Association data) in October alone the Arlington well produced enough gas for about 5,500 homes for a year," writes Tom Fowler in The Houston Chronicle. Chesapeake's Operations Manager for Barnett Shale Dave Leopold says the well could be in business for 50 years or more. This number is higher than a speech given by T. Boone Pickens at the University of Texas at Dallas  when he predicted natural gas would last for 30 years.

The well has a potential to bring in several million dollars if it spits out 10 billion cubic feet of gas with an average price of $6 per 1000 cubic feet. Undoubtedly, the news should please Exxon and Total, two big oil companies that have recently announced deals with companies working in Barnett Shale.

All isn't yellow rosy in Texas. Residents of Dish have pollution concerns about the drilling's effects on the air, which could have cancer-causing agents. Test results released in late 2008 show elevated levels of benzene, a cancer-causing chemical.

The Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has taken air examples that show high levels of benzene found in some sites, but it needed to do more sampling with plans to release the results in early 2010. Barnett Shale Energy Education Council reports, "We don't know what the TCEQ will reveal in their next report, but here are some facts we do know. The most likely source of benzene at natural gas well sights is condensate storage tanks, but of the counties in the EPA's nine-county non-attainment area, only two, Denton and Parker, have any significant production of condensate." The town of Dish is in Denton County.

Barnett Shale Energy Education Council and Chesapeake Energy are having a third-party engineering firm to conduct the testing. Chesapeake checks its wells daily and watches for leaks with help from infrared cameras. The company says that its wells produce "almost no condensate—the lightweight form of crude oil that is thought to be a source of some benzene emissions."