So I recently was traveling through the Alliance/Salem area and I notice all these small oil well looking pumping stations. Seems like every other house had one on their property with maybe a several thousand gallon tank right beside it. For every 20 I seen, only a couple would be pumping? Why are they not all going?? How much money to be made annual?

They're mostly shallow well 3000 to 5000 feet, possibly less, vertical wells.   The tanks are for limited amounts of crude, there are other tanks for the condensate that are around.

I have 3 well on my property.  They just re-cased one well a few years ago.

The pump jacks turn on depending on demand, there are well tenders that ride around and turn on sets of pumpjacks. These pump into a transmission line.  The pumps turn on and off as needed, depending on the pressure of the transmission line. The transmission line, flows into a sales line.  From the sales line, it steps down to houses / businesses / etc.    I forget exactly what PSI they turn on / turn off, but the well tender's job is to make sure their output is worth enough to feed the sales line.   If the output of a series of wells is not enough to feed the sales line pressure wise, they're turned off until there is enough pressure in the well that they can.

Off of 3 wells, a transmission line and a sales line running through our property, we make about $150-160 a month, max.

Wow, thanks for such an informative reply! When you say "they" re cased the well, who is they? Are you basically just making the money off the permission for the company to pump there? You don't have any investment in it?

We have 0 investment in it.   Eastern Everflow at the time, was the one who paid a well service company to recase it.

We get a percentage of the royalties off the sales of the gas and the crude oil. They typically pump the crude oil tank out once a year.  What the exact percentages are for royalties, I'm not sure off the top of my head.

Thanks again!

Key thing to remember with natural gas, is there's no storage of it really. At least in our area.  So sales lines will need X amount of PSI of gas in them at all time. Gas lines are normally run in big loops.

Transmission lines, from the wells will feed into the sales line as needed.  So when the pressure drops below X on a sales line, the transmission line will feed it till the sales line is above X.

However, you don't want to keep shoving pressure into the sales line, or the transmission lines.  So the wells need to shut off.

And as I said above, wells need to regenerate their gas pressure. It doesn't last forever, but to an extent, it does come back slowly.  The life of the well is all in the geology.

This thread reminds me of why you're one of my fav arfcommers. I have learned probably more from you and your posts than from anyone else here.

I'm just a monkey with an idea and a keyboard.  If people take something from my posts, awesome. But I try not to post on topics that I know nothing about.

Side effect of my business mentality: Never ask a question that you don't already know the answer to.

But to explain that mentality, requires adult beverages and cigars.

There are many natural gas storage caverns in OH/WV/PA. One of the biggest is in the area just West of the Akron Canton Airport. There is no man made storage that I am aware of however.

There's approximately 3 billion cubic feet of storage around the US.  However, while that number sounds like a lot - it's really not.   It's used more or less, from my understanding, as like a water tower. To keep pressures high, if the wells cannot regenerate / pump enough.  Plus our storage levels, have seen a significant decline, for some reason. I'm not super big into the natural gas world, but we've lost about 1BCF of storage around the US in 5 years.  Although, we're producing so much natural gas that major well pads are having to flare it off.

Again, from my understanding of what OP was referring to with pump jack wells, those feed mostly lower pressure sales / transmission lines.  Where as the deeper wells which are much higher pressure, are feeding into the high pressure lines, as it's not as much work to compress a steady, higher PSI feed.  I know the compressor station near me, was recently converted from feeding off low pressure shallow wells, to deep wells. New pipelines were run, etc.

But again, my knowledge pretty much ends after the gas goes into the sales line.

+1

I was in that very area except east. I flew into cak and drove straight east to Salem.

(You forgot BEER! )

Great posts. By the way, the farm I had (Ashland County, 160 acres) had one gas well drilled on it back in the early 1940s. The farm owner back then thought it was a great idea to accept the lordly sum of $400 to burden the land with the gas lease and all subsequent transfers, leases, and buy-outs.

The upshot was that we got like $50 every quarter from Columbia Gas plus free gas for the farmstead. (The free gas was good, since the house, built in 1853, was so drafty you could have thrown a cat through any of the holes or gaps in the original siding. Durn furnace worked 24/7 all winter long.)

The bad part was having all the leasee's contractors coming through our place at all hours to build roads to the well, cut down trees, defoliate the grass and shrubs around the well at their convenience. They never seemed to alert us when they'd come around.

Under the Ashland/Richland/Knox Counties is an IMMENSE natural gas storage area. It's contained in all the subsurface fissures, cracks, and caves below the land there in the various sandstone formations (I forgot their names.) Columbia Gas would even pump natural gas from Texas up there to store for winter usage here in Ohio the storage area was THAT big!

Our old neighbor there had said when he was a kid (1920s) a lightening bolt hit the wellhead (up on a hill) and a tremendous explosion and fire ensued such that farmers from the tricounty area came out just to see the fireworks!

There's always some "bad" with any "good" with a benefit like free gas--frozen meters, valves, etc. Ever go out in -20*F to "warm up" your nat gas feed line way up on a hill that goes to your farmhouse? I have! Not fun.

We used to have a 680 acre farm that had 6 gas wells on it.  When my grandfather passed, we had to sell it due to the IRS at the time.  Taxes. (Fuck the IRS, and the estate tax btw.)

We have 100 acres now, the wells were pre existing on the property. And the pipelines.  Although they did decommission one pipeline completely as they replaced it near the road.

When my parents first built their house, their regulator froze up several times... So I understand what you're saying. Their problem I guess is the feed line was too high of a PSI. So we ended up putting a larger step down regulator in near the transmission line.

My best story is fixing a broken feedline on the 4th of July.  My dad woke up to gas bubbling out of the ground.  Right where we were going to put the cooker for the party.  Panick ensued.  Called the well tender, they couldn't have a contractor out for days... But the well tender had a clamp fix kit.

We break out our mini excavator, fine the pipeline.  Well tender comes out. We ask "how do you tell where the leak is?" "Light a match." - it was a good laugh, but yeah no.

We traced it back about 5 feet from the initial hole.  I got down in and clamped it.  Sort of gassed myself being 4 foot in a trench with 150psi natural gas spraying in my face.  Put the clamp on and burried it... Been fixed since.

Good times...

Adult beverages means beer... Or bourbon... Or whatever floats your boat haha.