The last speaker at the North Dakota Governor’s Pipeline Summit was Niles Hushka, chief operating officer of Kadrmas, Lee & Jackson, or KL&J, an engineering, survey and planning firm providing oil and gas services with offices across North Dakota as well as in Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota.
Saying he would bring several different perspectives to the summit, Hushka began by telling the audience that people in his business are in contact with landowners on numerous occasions.
Last year, he said, KL&J “staked about 1,640 of 1,960 wells that are out there,” and went on to explain that through activities such as staking, drilling, electrical installation, pipeline construction, and gathering as-builts, his people hear from landowners “from the beginning to the end.”
The second perspective Hushka brought to the summit was that of a landowner.
He explained that he was raised in a large family on a farm near Dickenson, N.D., and when he was growing up working on the farm he “cussed” his grandfather many times for “picking the crummiest land in the country and making us haul bales on it.”
He later married into a farm family, also in western North Dakota, and with energy development on his land, he now thinks there were “two great visionaries” in his family — one being is grandfather “because he picked some great land,” and the other himself because “I picked a great wife with great land,” he quipped.
So what do these two perspectives offer for pipeline companies?
Pipelines, Hushka said, add significant value to everyone involved in oil and gas production from engineers to landowners, and they offer the most environmentally safe method of transport.
For the producer, he said, pipelines provide reliability, and for the mineral owner, pipelines provide money that goes back into local economies.
And in terms of impacts, “there are very few things that are going on today that we can say reduce local impacts,” but pipelines, he said, do just that. As an example, he said that as a quick rule of thumb, every six-inch pipeline can move more than 12,000 barrels of product per day and remove about 70 trucks from the road.
Without providing details, Hushka briefly talked about the current shortage of pipeline capacity in North Dakota and said this situation will soon change because his firm has a lot of pipelines on which they are currently working — all of which will be coming into play. There are many pipelines in the queue today, he said, that will tie together major pipeline systems in the area.
Positive pipeline opportunities
Referring to a landowner’s concerns, Hushka talked first about the safety of pipelines.
Pipelines, he said, are being built to historically safe standards that continue to be reinforced and “rigidly adhered to.”
The oil companies, he said, are under great scrutiny today, and of all of the different clients his firm works for, the one that has the most rules; the one that adheres the hardest to safety; the one that insists that they do everything exactly right every time is the oil industry.
“There’s no lax performance in the field and if there is you’re out of there.”
Pipeline companies, he said, are also insistent on the quality and standards of the people who work on their projects.
Another pipeline positive for landowners, he said, is their very low profile and limited visibility, and that once the pipelines are in the ground there are only a couple markers left.
Other pipeline positives for landowners he identified are: they are fully functional in all weather in all seasons; they reduce truck traffic and, consequently, reduce road damage; and despite rumors going around, he said, pipelines have significantly less opportunity for spills than do other methods of transporting products.
Addressing landowners
Hushka identified a number of concerns that are always important to landowners, including potential depreciation of land values, impacts to privacy, real or perceived loss of property rights, aesthetic impacts, and fair monetary compensation.
In addition, he said, there may be places on a landowner’s property that are “sacred” to the landowner and the pipeline people need to be sensitive to such issues.
“Have the conversations,” he said, and talk to them about what the impacts are going to do to their surroundings. “Talk about the fact that there’s going to be weeds on that thing and you’re going to have to seed it a couple of times.”
As a landowner himself, he urged companies to, “talk to me about it, tell me what’s there, do your best to repair the scars and we go from there.”
Utility corridors
One of the most important concepts in oil and gas development today, according to Hushka, is the “unit corridor” where all utilities are placed in the same corridor.
One advantage to this approach is that you only need to talk to the landowner one time, he said, and once the landowner approves it “then off we move.”
A lot of other things can go into such a unit corridor, Hushka said, including crude transmission, production water, sales gas, fuel gas, fresh water and communications.
“All can fit in the same place,” depending on terrain, he said.
The corridor may need to be “stretched or narrowed,” and typically such corridors range from 100 to 150 feet in width, again depending on terrain.
Once everyone agrees about where the corridor is going, then “one fee is negotiated and off we go.”
Hushka said he knows there are unit corridors being negotiated today for oil, production water and gas coming off the wellhead, and other utilities can be added to a corridor later.
The unit corridor concept, he said, can alleviate a lot of the issues and problems encountered today with right-of-way negotiations.
Past, current development methods
Showing a satellite photograph of the Artesia field in southeast New Mexico, Hushka pointed out a very high density of well pads in the field, and said that was how oil and gas development used to be done. All the white marks on the photograph, he said, are “unreclaimed scars.” “
Those will never be reclaimed” he said, because, “this was in an era when we didn’t have to reclaim scars; this is when we came in and did what we wanted to do.”
Then pointing to a photograph of a modern pipeline installation in a rural, fertile and scenic agricultural area, Hushka said “this is the way we install today,” using, he said “very comprehensive methods making sure the topsoil is stripped, making sure that we avoid wooded draws when possible, doing everything possible to bore when we can.”
The result, he said, is “a line like the Enbridge Alberta Clipper, which has been fantastically restored.”
So when pipeline companies come in today, he said, referring to the photograph, unlike in the past, this is how they do work.
“This,” he concluded, “makes a happy pipeline company and a happy landowner.”
