Encana opens Shreveport LNG fleet station

Feb. 28, 2012
Encana Natural Gas Inc. has opened Louisiana’s first liquefied natural gas fueling station at Frierson along Interstate 49 about 15 miles south of Shreveport.

Encana Natural Gas Inc. has opened Louisiana’s first liquefied natural gas fueling station at Frierson along Interstate 49 about 15 miles south of Shreveport.

The facility is open to the public and will serve heavy duty fleets, including 50 trucks owned by Heckmann Water Resources, which handles water produced from Encana’s wells in the Haynesville shale gas play. Heckmann has another 150 trucks on order.

Three rigs drilling Haynesville wells for Encana are retrofitted to run on LNG, which is trucked 600 miles to Frierson and to rigs in the Shreveport area from a peak shaving facility in Chattanooga, Tenn., operated by Pivotal LNG, a subsidiary of AGL Resources Inc., Atlanta.

The Frierson station is designed to dispense 15,000-30,000 gal/day of LNG, or the equivalent of 400-800 MMscf/year of natural gas, said David Hill, vice president-operations of Encana Natural Gas, Denver. A rotary rig consumes the equivalent of 10.3 MMscf of gas as LNG to drill the typical Haynesville well, Hill said.

Encana built the Frierson LNG station next to a conventional truck stop, and next door another company is constructing a station to provide compressed natural gas, Hill added. A typical semitrailer truck will get about 6 mpg on diesel or LNG, but it must carry 1.7 gal of LNG for the energy equivalent of 1 gal of diesel, he said.

Frierson is the easternmost public LNG station east of Los Angeles in the Interstate 20/Interstate 10 corridor, although the route still has some gaps, Hill noted.

Fourteen of the 44 rigs Encana was running in North America at the end of 2011 were natural gas fueled, including four in the Haynesville, two in the Denver basin, and eight in Wyoming fed gas produced in Jonah field by pipeline. The company figures it saved $11 million in 2011 by using natural gas in its drilling operations, Hill said.

The Haynesville LNG-fueled rigs, since they are not tied to pipelines, could see duty for Encana in other plays such as the Barnett shale in the Fort Worth basin or the Tuscaloosa marine shale play in South Louisiana, Hill pointed out.

Encana has converted 23 vehicles, about half its fleet assigned to the Haynesville, to use CNG.

Encana was producing a net 650 MMcfd of gas from the Haynesville at the end of 2011.

Contact Alan Petzet at [email protected].