With 60 inches of snowfall since late December in the Denver area and multiple weeks of sub-zero temperatures in eastern Utah and western Wyoming, Rockies producers and drilling service companies have waged a tough battle against wellhead freeze-offs and snow removal in an effort to maintain production.

It’s been “a real pain the backside,” Chuck Stanley, executive vice president of Questar’s Market Resources (QMR) subsidiary, said early last week.

“A couple of days ago it got above zero during the day, but we had minus 20-30 degree nights and very cold days,” he said. “What happens in our area is the cold gets trapped down in the topographic basins and just sits there.”

The bitter cold led to well freeze offs in the Uinta Basin and in western Wyoming, Stanley said. It also made it a challenge keeping fracture-stimulation water heated.

“Every well we drill is fracture stimulated with water-based fluids,” Stanley said. “We normally see some freeze-offs this time of year so it’s nothing dramatic. But it is a real challenge. It’s immaterial to our total production volume, but it is keeping our guys scrambling to keep all of our wells flowing.

“It’s still sub-zero at night here and in the single digits during the day. It makes things difficult, not impossible. It slows you down.”

Farther south on the eastern slope of the Rockies, heavy snow and very little melting left producers with some pretty huge snow removal bills. “Our snow removal bill in January in the DJ Basin was about $125,000,” said EnCana Corp. spokesman Doug Hock. “We purchased a couple of snowmobiles just to get to some of these locations.

“Since the first storm on Dec. 20, the biggest challenge has been getting all the batteries and wells up and running,” he said. “In the Denver-Julesburg Basin we operate about 800 wells (50 MMcf/d of gas production). During the worst stretch our production there was down somewhere between 10% and 14%.

“This is really getting old,” he added. “We’ve had snow for six consecutive weekends. Today it’s cold and it’s supposed to be cold all week but I don’t think we’re supposed to get any more snow. Hopefully we’ll break out of this at some point.”

Hock said it’s been a challenge thawing the valves on older equipment in the field. And with the ground frozen 2-3 feet deep in places, construction has been brought nearly to a stand-still. He said early last week that EnCana still had about 36 wells in the DJ shut in, representing about 4 MMcf/d and 150 bbl of oil.

EOG Resources’ Gary L. Thomas, executive vice president of operations, said his company also was “hit pretty hard” by well freeze-offs in Oklahoma as the bitter cold moved well south into the Midcontinent. “We have the flexibility to delay services to optimize our pricing,” he said. “We’re always trying to optimize, but we did do some delays on some of our completions.”

Denver-based consulting firm Bentek Energy, which recently reported a 5.3% drop in total U.S. gas production between Jan. 10 and Jan. 17 — some of it due to freeze-offs, said gas flows on pipelines in the Rockies are gradually returning to normal. For example, Kern River to California was back up early last week to near 100% of capacity at 2 Bcf/d after having dipped to about 1.7 Bcf/d Jan. 18-20.

Northwest Pipeline flows south of Green River to Opal, WY, was still recovering early last week to about 275 MMcf/d from MMcf/d on Jan. 21 — on Jan. 1 flows totaled 350 MMcf/d. And Cheyenne Plains flows from the Cheyenne Hub to Panhandle Eastern were running near 800 MMcf/d last Monday, up about 200 MMcf/d from a low point on Jan. 19 but not quite back to the 1 Bcf/d levels seen in December.

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