AskChesapeake

While surface disturbance is unavoidable to extract oil and natural gas in the Anadarko BasinBarnett ShaleEagle Ford ShaleHaynesville ShaleMarcellus ShaleMississippi LimeNiobrara ShaleUtica Shale region, the company is continuously striving to minimize our environmental footprint.company’s environmental footprint is becoming smaller all the time.

Conventional techniques using vertical well development once required as many as 32 wells to effectively produce energy from a two-square-mile area. Today, however, cutting-edge technologies such as horizontal drilling enable us to consolidate multiple wellbores onto a single pad to more effectively recover oil and gas in that same two-square-mile area, resulting in a 90% reduction in overall surface presence. Using this approach, multiple oil and gas wells can exist on a single padsite and be serviced by a single access road and pipeline.

After drilling, only a small wellhead, some storage tanks and waterproduction separation equipment remain for each gas well on a padsite. Oil producing wells typically have a separator, heater treater, low-pressure tower and tank on each site. Oil wells which produce condensate may, however, require additional equipment. Even with multiple wells, a Chesapeake padsite can easily fit into the natural landscape.

Throughout production, we retain only a small ongoing footprint. And once a given site is no longer productive, we stay to ensure that the wells are properly plugged and abandoned, the equipment is removed and the site is replanted with vegetation. The transition is seamless.​​​​​​​​​