< PreviousA wholly-owned subsidiary of The Broe Group, GW has a vision of expanding the American energy industry today and years into the future. “Energy cycles come and go,” states Great Western President and Chief Executive Officer Rich Frommer. “We look for opportunities every day, always with a longer development horizon in mind.” The company operates over four hundred wells in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, centered in the eastern part of Colorado and stretching into parts of Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas. The basin is known for the deposits of oil and gas that are critical for America’s energy independence. GW is one of the top ten drillers in the United States by production volume, producing 11,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Colorado means much more to Great Western than a place to drill. GW is integral to the community and recognizes the importance of giving back through a variety of initiatives, including a $20,000 donation to the Windsor-Severance Re-4 School District. The donation was earmarked for Google Nexus tablet computers which, in the words of Superintendent Karen Trusler, “had significant impact on the education for these second graders.” Among the many benefits to students were fewer behavioral issues and distractions. Other generous donations, such as $25,000 from The Broe Family Foundation, resulted in the creation of the Windsor Scholarship Fund, the single largest donation to the program in its history. The funds are being used to aid youth athletic and social skills, giving them new and exciting opportunities.Set apart from other companies by its professionalism and willingness to work with landowners and local communities and sensitive to the needs of stakeholders including homeowners, GW contin-ually works towards easing any issues that may arise.One of Great Western’s successful stories involves creating a balance between the interests of GW and those opposed to oil and gas activity in Colorado. Drilling wells in Windsor were initially planned for the Pace property west of County Road 13 and had to be located to “GW continually works towards easing any issues that may arise.”40 nearby sites owned by Martin Lind, a well-known and respect-ed land developer. Lind is behind Water Valley, a site of approxi-mately 4,000 acres of undeveloped land primarily east of Inter-state 25 and north of Crossroads Boulevard in Colorado. “The project has been a struggle for a long time and one we’ve been working on literally since May of 2013,” says GW Surface Land Manager Eric Creed. “We had origi-nally planned to develop those minerals from the property across the street from Pace with Martin Lind on his property, a future golf course. These pads were actually going to go inside his golf course in an innovative way.”When the arrangement with Lind stalled, Great Western went across the street to a neighbor who had a large field and successfully negoti-ated a surface land use agreement (SUA) with him. Although SUAs are not required under any statute and often cost several hundred thousand dollars, Great Western took it upon itself to conduct business properly at its own expense, out of respect. While out on the Pace property with a con-struction crew who were assigned to build the turning lanes the company would need, Creed was approached by a few residents from a nearby neighborhood upset over the possibility of anything going there. Construction soon triggered a firestorm with locals and the press. Some homeowners were concerned about issues ranging from depreciation of home values to possible contamination of water from fracking, which involves injecting liquid at high pressures into underground rock formations to open existing fissures so oil and gas can be extracted. Soon, a neighborhood group was formed. The Windsor Neigh-bors for Responsible Drilling, LLC (WNRD) was opposed to the proposed twenty-eight wells and forty-five tanks. The group created a Facebook page, hired a lawyer and sat down with the governor and director of the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), which works to ensure the responsible development of the state’s oil and gas resources.A petition was then created to compel Great Western’s drilling activities to be 2,500 feet back from houses and waterways, instead of the 500-foot setback regulation. This would result in a total loss for Great Western and nearly eliminate the oil industry.“People weren’t thinking about that in three dimensions, they were thinking about it in two dimensions, left and right, forward and backward,” comments Creed. “They weren’t thinking about the aquifer we sit on, which is about two hundred feet below the ground. So, if you put that into play, and start counting stuff vertically as well as on the surface horizontally, then that’s a one hundred percent loss for the industry in Colorado.” Colorado is the seventh top-producing state for oil, with a tre-mendous increase from thirty million barrels in 2009 to over ninety-four million barrels in 2014. The negative impact on the Colorado energy sector if the petition was successful would have been disastrous.“A massive service use agreement comprising eighteen separate documents and covering 364 pages was created which resulted in ‘a solution which we think works well for everybody.’”42Following Great Western’s filing of permits for wells on the Pace property, groups pressured local government to annex the property, which was unin-corporated at the time and not part of Windsor.Although the mayor said no property had been annexed in 125 years and wouldn’t be now, he agreed to the zoning change, with the result being that the land was now under the juris-diction of Windsor, and Great Western was to follow an entirely different set of rules and best management practices. What followed were a number of ballot initiatives, a campaign called Raise the Bar, and three and a half years of negotiations with Martin Lind over relocating the project again to his property. Raindance, part of the entrepreneur’s Water Valley development, already had two golf courses and lakes stocked with fish. “GW is integral to the community and recognizes the importance of giving back through a variety of initiatives.”A massive service use agreement comprising eighteen separate documents and covering 364 pages was created which resulted in “a solution which we think works well for everybody,” says Creed. Through negotiations, even initial local oppo-nents such as Shawndra Barry came to support the project.In a letter supporting Great Western’s applications, she wrote: “The combination of assurances made to the impacted community by GWOC and the technological components used in this devel-opment allows me to show strong support for the drilling and spacing units and pooling applications.” Barry added, “in my opinion, the proposed Raindance location is the best location to access approximately 2,800 mineral acres for numerous reasons, and GWOV should be commended for all of these reasons.”“Our position was: the rules work,” says Creed. “The system works. If you just sit down with them, listen and address the concerns of neighbors and residents, the system works. It doesn’t need to be changed. You don’t need setbacks of 2,500 feet or 1,000 feet because, in this industry, we are self-policing in some respects. At Great Western, our default is 1,000 feet. So when we are looking 44at a new area and we put a halo on these houses, we put 1000-foot halos, and we put 500-foot halos; 500 is the law, 1,000 is our preference. So we try to find a location and where we can build a pad beyond 1,000 feet. We can’t always do that because there isn’t always enough room, but that is our default mode.”Other anti-oil and gas opponents have been persuaded through education and information and now say that Great Western is one of the best companies in the field when it comes to complying with requests and being receptive. “The project unfolded. It reached a place where everybody seems to be happy, and we are hoping to build in a couple of months and start drilling later in the summer or fall. It took a long time, but we pulled it off in the end.”EnerCorp Sand Solutions provides patented and proprietary sand management solutions to the oil and gas industry. The company special-izes in developing sand control technol-ogy and is well established as an inno-vator in the sand management industry. EnerCorp designs, manufactures, sells, rents, and services its equipment throughout North America and intends to expand its reach. EnerCorp was established as the result of a joint venture between two sand management companies: Dynacorp, a Canadian company founded in Calgary Alberta in 2008, and Energes Oilfield Solutions, an American company founded in 2013. The companies operated independently until March of 2016 when the two collaborated on a project in the Permian Basin. By December of the following year, Energes and Dynacorp merged to form EnerCorp Sand Solutions. The company has grown substantially by keeping its attention on the changing needs of the industry and its customers. EnerCorp has been able to stand above the competition and push sand man-agement technology forward with its innovative products. “We’re a research and development company with a full line of patented products on the leading edge of sand management,” says Vice President of Business Development Bruce McKenna. “EnerCorp is by far the leader in adopting new technology, new products, and new ways to solve sand management challenges.” Written by Ryan CartnerManaging the sand is vital. If the flow of sand is not effectively controlled, it will erode mechanical valves and other important mechanical components. The result is costly maintenance and repairs, at best. At worst, damaged valves can result in explosions, fires, and other serious risks to the safety of everyone working at the site. As shale producers drill deeper and longer laterals, more frac sand is pumped in multiple stages in order to keep these tight formations open for oil and gas pro-duction. Even when only small percentag-es of this frac sand is returned to surface it can amount to thousands of pounds over various time frames. Enercorp products are designed to handle the largest amount of sand returns versus other competitors. Managing the sand with the most efficient technology is what sepa-rates Enercorp.EnerCorp’s patented sand control products enable operators to greatly improve the speed of this initial drilling phase, resulting in much higher initial productions than have been possible in the past. Its equipment allows for much faster and much safer output through-out the entire lifecycle of the well. EnerCorp’s products consist of three product types that are each in a state of constant evolution. All three of these lines, including the dual and triple hori-zontal sand filters, vertical sand cyclone, and flowback test separators, are patented proprietary products that have each significantly improved the way sand management is being done in oil fields throughout North America. These products have been widely adopted and are considered state of the art, but EnerCorp refuses to rest on its laurels. “We’re not happy just inventing one or two products and saying ‘Here’s what we’ve got. We’re the nicest guys in the world. You should use us,’” says “The company has grown substantially by keeping its attention on the changing needs of the industry and its customers.”47RESOURCE IN FOCUS McKenna. “It’s continuing to strive to enhance our product line and staying ahead of the curve.” Despite the success of its products, the company concentrates on research and enhanc-ing its equipment and is always working to push the technol-ogy even further.The first of EnerCorp’s three main product types is its horizon-tal filtration solution. Dual and triple horizontal sand filters use innovative, field-tested, patented technology to filter sand par-ticles as small as fifty microns. Competing equipment often uses a process called velocity-knockout to remove sand from the oil as it flows through the filtration system. While this process can allow fine particles to pass through, EnerCorp’s screen-based solution will remove even the smallest particles. A major oil producer located in the Delaware Basin was having trouble with one of its separators. When a seal failed after only a few days, the company realized that sand was passing through the filtration system and accumulating in the equipment. As a result, equipment was always failing, resulting in significant and highly expensive downtime. The company installed EnerCorp’s horizontal filtration system and eliminated the problem entirely.While the horizontal filters can handle up to five thousand pounds per square inch (psi) of pressure, the vertical cyclonic system is designed for much higher volume and higher flow rates with up to 15,000 psi of pressure. Finally, the company’s flowback pressure control systems are designed to be used during a process called flowback, which refers to the recovery of the fluids that are used during drilling. These three flagship products demonstrate the company’s capacity to develop creative solutions to the unique needs of the industry. As well as offering these products for sale, EnerCorp also main-tains a rental fleet with installation and maintenance services and operator training. This means that customers can reduce the initial expense of becoming operational. The company’s rental agreements are flexible enough to allow an operator to rent high-capacity equipment to use during the early high volume production stage and then switch to different equip-ment for longer-term use. The company has complete training services for all of its equipment, ensuring that, whether owned or rented, the customer will be able to operate it safely, effi-ciently, and for a very long time. After more than a decade in business, EnerCorp has grown to be the largest sand management company in North America, with nearly three hundred employees at two locations in Canada and seven in the United States. The company is poised to expand even more in the future. “Our reach currently is all of North America, but we do some work in South America,” says McKenna. “The vast majority of our service work in completion and sand management happens in the United States, and we fabricate all of our equipment in Canada, but we want to continue to evolve internationally. We see a lot of opportunities abroad. We want to build more of an international base and show those pro-ducers why we’re the leader.” A key component to the company’s success is a strongly held commitment to its values. These are reflected in the com-pany’s ever-changing product selection and an engineering team that has consistently worked at the leading edge of sand management technology to create quality of the work and a solid reputation. Every employee of EnerCorp believes in its principles and operates accordingly, driving the company to so much success. “These products have been widely adopted and are considered state of the art, but EnerCorp refuses to rest on its laurels.”48 The company has also been very active in giving back to the communities in which it operates. EnerCorp supports many charitable organizations and educational programs including the Alberta Children’s Hospital, the Ronald McDonald House of Southern Alberta, Women in Trades, the Special Olympics, and many more.“We’re very passionate about giving back to the community and supporting various charities,” says McKenna. “Giving back is a big thing for us.”As the oil and gas industry changes, EnerCorp will keep investing in the research and development of creative solutions so that it can help the sand management industry to grow along with it. “Traditionally, sand is a pain, and a lot of companies struggle with it,” says McKenna. “They’ll use whatever they can to try and get by, but what we do and what our company likes to focus on, is being ahead of the new techniques. We need to continue to adapt to that and stay on the leading edge of what we’re offering.”49RESOURCE IN FOCUS Next >