Back in 2010 I wrote a piece about how Big Science — the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) computer center — was moving out of Boulder County and Big Oil — ConocoPhillips’ research and training campus — was moving in.
Fast forward to today.
The new NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center officially opened its doors in Cheyenne on Oct. 15. It houses a $30 million IBM supercomputer called Yellowstone that can do about 1.5 quadrillion floating point operations a second (or 1.5 petaflops).
But ConocoPhillips was a no-show. The same day NCAR opened for business, it was announced the undeveloped 432-acre research campus site, the old StorageTek campus in Louisville, Colo., was up for sale.
Seems that along the way ConocoPhillips reorganized into two independent companies — the one that got the putative research center also got the existing research center in Bartlesville, Okla., … change of direction … change of plans, etc.
So Big Oil’s outta’ here.
But while all that was going on, Middle-Sized Oil and Little Oil were moving into the area, and a full-fledged oil boom erupted on Boulder’s doorstep.
Remember all those old oil wells in Weld County and even a few in eastern Boulder County?
Well, they’re all part of the Wattenberg Field, a 3,200-square-mile oil and natural gas field that has been producing for 40 years. Some of the gas burned at CU during the past four decades came from there. Ditto Boulder.
But the oil and gas was mostly in shale formations, which meant a lot of wells had to be drilled to get a relatively small percentage of oil out. Forty years and 22,000 wells later, the field was in decline. Then along came horizontal drilling and multistage fracking — and the new oil boom was on.
The new technology has revived gas production in the field, but the real prize is the oil and liquid hydrocarbons that are associated with natural gas. The latter include “condensate,” sometimes called natural gasoline. Seems almost everything around here is natural these days, even the gasoline.
Like crude, condensate sells for about $80-$100 a barrel. It turns out there are billions of barrels of crude and condensate now accessible in Wattenberg.
Naturally Boulder’s green activists at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center are horrified and have taken time out from their busy schedule of battling genetically modified sugar beets to fight fracking.
So the drill bits are spinning to the right, the protesters are spinning to the left and protests, moratoriums, regulations, referendums and lawsuits are flying left and right.
Natural gasoline, huh? I think it’s only a matter of time before Whole Foods opens a filling station in its parking lot.
