Methane gas is a clean-burning fuel that lies waiting underground
in the area's coal beds. Some landowners need the profit they
could get by selling the gas or leasing the land's mineral
rights.
However, as methane gas is brought to the earth's surface, it is
accompanied by water, water which has usually been made salty by
the remnants of an ancient inland sea. Without management, the
salty water could harm a lot of the area's soil. Since the land
will be needed long after the estimated 20-year-life of methane
production, the health of the soil is of major economic
importance to the area.
"Twenty years is less than half the working career of a farmer or
rancher. When the methane is gone, the rancher will still be
there trying to make a living from the land," says Jim Bauder.
Bauder and Doug Dollhopf of MSU's Land Resources and
Environmental Sciences and a team of students are working to
determine how the cast-off salty water would affect the variety
of soils in the area proposed for gas extraction.
Bauder began working on the issue a dozen years ago. Since then,
teams of students and scientists have gathered information on the
soils of the Powder River Valley, where much of the methane
production is expected to occur. Now that methane and the
resulting salty water controversy have come to a head, he is
ready for a two-year sprint that will convert very complex data
about soil and water chemistry into decision-making tools that
can help preserve the land.
"We have a lot of data, but what we need are tools that help a
land owner make decisions. We don't have those yet, but we're
going to get them," says Bauder.
Without special management, the result of a lot of that water on
southeast Montana soils would not be good. Bauder describes its
effect as similar to that of soap on dirty clothing.
"Our soaps are a type of sodium compound," says Bauder. "They
work because they cause organic break down and soil dispersion,
destroying the way the soil holds together. If it does that in
its role as a cleaner, what is it going to do when you apply it
to the ground?"
"It is a very complicated soil chemistry situation," says Bauder.
"It is also a very strange situation." For instance, the water
might be safe for most people to drink, but still damage the
soil.
Once begun, how long the methane gas extraction continues in
southeastern Montana depends both on the amount of gas and the
number of wells drilled. Though some experts have said the gas
field has a 20-year life expectancy, the estimates of the number
of wells that could be drilled has varied from 3,500 to 75,000.
Many wells might distribute the financial benefits of drilling to
a larger number of people. Fewer wells might let the economics
favor water treatment.
Sodium-rich water can be managed, but scientists don't know
enough yet to do so for every combination of soil type that
exists.
That's exactly what Bauder's research group is hoping to come up
with -- a set of guidelines that will let land managers
anticipate potential problems associated with water from methane
gas development and either avoid those problems or manage them.
There are other problems associated with the process leading up
to methane extraction, says Bauder. For example, noxious weeds
may invade along the roads created for getting equipment to the
drilling site, and the roads may increase hunter access and
thereby increase pressure on game.
But clean-burning fuel is needed. The pumping apparatus is
relatively small. The power supply and piping are typically
underground. Extraction would increase income to the land owners
and surrounding towns over the 20-year life of the project.
Because there are both pros and cons, the Montana Oil and Gas
Commission has initiated the development of a limited number of
wells in the Montana part of the Powder River area for data
collection to support an environmental impact statement.
Bauder is working with landowners, Montana Conservation
Districts, the EPA, the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, the Bureau
of Land Management and USDA to develop the guidelines land
managers could use to figure out what criteria of water quality
would need to be specified in drilling contracts. Overall, he
wants to find and define the criteria that will allow use of
coal-bed methane in a win-win way. He expects to have those
guidelines determined within the next two years and to make them
widely accessible to landowners.
Two MSU graduate students and several undergraduate students in
Land Resources and Environmental Sciences work with Bauder and
Doug Dollhopf to answer water quality questions associated with
methane gas development.
The graduate students are Kim Robinson of North Carolina and
Shannon Phelps of Bozeman.
The undergraduate students involved in the project are Krista
Pearson of Colorado, Lindsey Carlson of Circle, Dan Roath from
Colorado.
Pearson is project manager, coordinating "everybody who is out
there," says Bauder. Roath is working on watershed assessment.
Carlson communicates with the 1,500 irrigators in the Missouri
River System.
Altogether, about $50,000 will go to students over each of the
next two years to pay for their help on the project.
