The Bridger Well

A story of the Council of Fifty

This story is imagined. The places, people, and dates are invented, but the rules they follow are those of the NewVistas Constitution. How the conference organizes its sessions follows a working model, since the constitution does not set that out.

A number on a screen

Like most things in the Bridger community, it started at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, when the Operating presidency of Bureau 23 sat down for its weekly meeting in its office on the second floor of Public Building 23. Marta Ruiz was presiding that day, her third and last turn of the quarter, and she had a habit of opening each meeting by reading out a single figure before any other business was raised.

“Gas,” she said. “Bureau 18 has us at eighty-one per cent of our contracted supply for next winter. Two years ago we were at about sixty.”

The others had already seen the figure on their own screens, and none of them was surprised by it. The community had grown by three villages since the last supply contract was signed, and since every new building carried its own fuel cell plant, the demand for gas had grown along with it.

“We could always buy more on the open market,” said Ben Aldana, who was the youngest of the four. “I know the supplier in Rock Springs has capacity.”

“We could,” Marta said, “but we can only buy from producers who are measured to our rule on methane, and there aren’t many of those around. Even if we found one, we’d still have nowhere to put the carbon.” She pointed to the chart on the screen. “Every community in this basin is seeing the same thing. Pilot Butte posted almost exactly the same figure last month, so I think this is really a question for the conference rather than something Bridger should try to solve on its own.”

Three of the four agreed, while Ben asked for a little more time to read the figures before committing himself. By a quarter to ten they had drafted a short note setting out what they were seeing and what they thought it meant, and asking for the matter to go before the bureau council on Thursday.

Thursday

The Bureau 23 council of twelve was a larger body and moved more slowly, which was very much intended. Around the table sat Marta’s presidency of four, together with the Trustee presidency and the Regulatory presidency that each looked after Bureaus 11 and 23.

Daniel Okafor spoke first for the trustees. “Before we send anything to the conference, I’d like us to be clear about one thing. Whatever comes back from it, we won’t be putting money into any shared pool, and we won’t sign anything that turns our wells into somebody else’s property.”

“I don’t think anyone is proposing that,” Marta said.

“Not yet, no,” Daniel said with a smile, “but I’d still like it written down.”

Grace Holm, who was presiding for the regulators that quarter, had a different concern. “When fifty Bureau 23 councils sit in one room, sooner or later someone will want to talk about what they’re each paying for gas, and that’s a conversation we can’t have. The competition protocol doesn’t allow any talk of prices, or of dividing up suppliers, or of who should buy from whom. If the discussion starts heading that way, I’ll have to stop it, and I’d appreciate everyone here helping me.”

The council approved the note by nine votes of twelve, after adding Daniel’s sentence and Grace’s reminder to it. That afternoon the clerk filed it through the operating system onto the conference agenda, where every bureau council in the region could see that Bridger wanted to raise the question of gas.

The conference at Pilot Butte

That quarter it was Pilot Butte’s turn to host the conference. Its bureau councils had published the conference week four months in advance, and as the host community Pilot Butte had set aside a block of guest suites near its public buildings. Each of the 9,600 presidents coming from the region’s fifty communities booked his or her own suite through the same system everyone used for travel, and paid for it personally, along with meals and the fare on the regional line, so that no community ended up paying for anyone else’s visit.

Marta travelled up on the morning train with Daniel and Grace, and Grace spent most of the ride going through the agenda.

“Thirty-one communities have filed something about gas,” she said after a while. “And most of them are saying much the same thing we are.”

The Bureau 23 session met on the Tuesday morning in the assembly court of Pilot Butte’s Public Building 23. Fifty Operating presidencies filled the middle rows, and behind them sat the trustees and regulators who looked after Bureau 23, many of whom would be sitting in on the Bureau 11 session on Thursday as well. As the host, Pilot Butte’s own Bureau 23 presidency presided over the session, its four members taking turns through the week, one presiding while another kept the notes. Will Strand, a quiet engineer, took the chair that first morning, and by the afternoon he had handed it to a colleague and moved over to keeping the notes.

For most of that first day it was the Operating presidents who did the talking. Several communities had already licensed old seismic surveys of the basin, and two had commissioned studies of the well logs filed with the state over the previous sixty years. Towards the end of the afternoon, a president from the Seedskadee community put a map up on the screen.

“The old fields to the west were drilled with only one thing in mind,” she said, “and nobody at the time was looking for somewhere to put carbon back. Even so, their logs show us where the good sandstone is, both for gas and for storage. There’s also a storage hub already permitted in the basin, run by an operator outside NewVistas, and since their monitoring reports are public, it would be foolish of us not to learn from them.”

The work of drafting went to a subcommittee on the gas corridor, which Bridger led because its council had been the first to file the question. By Wednesday afternoon the subcommittee had a draft in front of it. It proposed a prospect area of about forty square miles, a corridor for a single trunk line to serve whichever communities chose to join, and a parallel corridor for a return line that would carry carbon dioxide back underground.

At that point the trustees went through the draft in detail, and they found plenty to change.

“Section four says the region will acquire the rights of way,” Daniel pointed out, “but the region can’t acquire anything, because it doesn’t exist as an owner. Each community will have to acquire its own section.”

The sentence was rewritten accordingly.

A trustee from Point of Rocks, which was the newest and smallest community in the region, raised a further concern. “If the wells end up on the ground that suits the communities who are here now, what happens to the communities that haven’t been founded yet?”

His question sent everyone back to the constitution, which was clear on the point. The hinterland was to be shared out by a published formula, based on its measured capacity and on the number of communities it served, and never by negotiation among the communities that happened to be there first. A paragraph was added to the draft to say so.

After the trustees, the regulators went through the draft line by line. Twice during the session Grace had to step in when the conversation began drifting towards what each community was paying its current supplier. A regulator from Little America asked for the methane provisions to be written out in full rather than summarized, while another checked each reference to state and federal permits against the rules as they currently stood.

On the Friday morning the conference published the finished proposal, along with a record showing that forty-four of the fifty communities’ Bureau 23 councils supported sending it home for consideration. Everyone in the room understood that the record carried no weight of its own, and that the proposal would only take effect in a community if that community chose to adopt it.

“Forty-four,” Marta said on the train home. “I’d call that a good result.”

“It’s a good start,” Daniel said, “but the real decision still has to be made at home.”

Taking it home

The Bridger council of twelve took up the proposal three weeks later and voted, ten of twelve, to take part. Under the decision the community would open the prospect to proposals from contractors and offer the help of its own bureaus wherever that would make the work easier, although it would not carry out any of the work itself, since officers in NewVistas never do. Six communities decided not to join that quarter, two of them saying they would wait to see how things went, and no one suggested that their standing was in any way lessened by that choice.

The following Monday, Bureau 23 published the need, which meant that any contractor could now submit a business proposal setting out the work to be done, the equipment it would lease, what it would charge, and how it would carry the risk. Each proposal then went through the community’s origination rails in the same way as any other Business Enterprise Plan, with Bureau 19 checking that it was complete, Bureau 20 verifying the demand behind it, and Bureau 21 testing whether it would actually work. A proposal was only approved once it had passed all three, and only then was its contractor licensed to begin.

What the old wells knew

Three geoscience firms submitted proposals for the prospecting, and the one that cleared the rails came from Ellen Park, who ran a geoscience Business Enterprise from the commercial floor of a Bridger apartment building. Her proposal was approved in five weeks and she was licensed for the work, with Bureau 23 helping by arranging her access to the regional data archive and to the state’s well records. Like every other owner, she leased her equipment from the community, and she worked four mornings a week.

“The machines do the tedious part,” she said, when a reporter from the regional paper asked how one person could get through sixty years of well logs. “They read every log the state has on file and flag anything that looks like sandstone with a good seal above it. That leaves me to spend my own hours on the hundred or so places where the answer isn’t obvious.”

In the end her report recommended three drill sites inside the prospect area, together with two deeper formations that looked suitable for returning the carbon.

Tom Whitaker’s fence line

The best of the three sites lay under land belonging to Tom Whitaker, whose family had ranched in the basin for four generations. The minerals beneath it had been separated from the surface in his grandfather’s time, and they now belonged partly to Tom and partly to the state.

The negotiating was in the hands of Ray Castillo, a land agent whose Business Enterprise had been licensed for the work once its own proposal was approved. Daniel Okafor went along with him, because anything that was signed would be held in the name of the Bridger Trust, and looking after the community’s title was the trustees’ responsibility. Tom met the two of them at his gate and did not ask them in.

“I’ve had people out here wanting things before,” he said.

“We’d like to lease your share of the minerals,” Daniel explained, “and agree a plan for one well pad and a buried line across the surface. If you say no, we’ll look somewhere else, and if you’d rather wait, we’ll leave the offer open for you.”

“And what if I say no for good?”

“Then your land stays exactly as it is. We’d make sure nothing we built got in the way of your access to anything, and the offer would stay on the table for as long as you cared to ignore it.”

Tom thought about this for a long moment. “My grandfather sold the minerals under the north pasture to a company in Denver, and they flared that gas for eleven years. You could see the flame from the house.”

“We don’t flare,” Daniel said. “It’s written into our constitution, and you’d be able to read the measurements for the well yourself every year.”

Tom said he would think it over, and eight months later, in the spring, he signed. The lease went to the Bridger community’s Asset Trust, in Bridger’s own name, and the state’s share of the minerals was leased by the same Trust at the next state land board sale.

Paperwork

The drilling went to a Business Enterprise belonging to Priya Nair, a drilling engineer whose business proposal had cleared the origination rails the previous autumn. Once she was licensed, her business filed the application for a permit to drill and the well spacing request with the state oil and gas commission, together with the air quality filings for the state environmental agency. Because a short stretch of the gathering line crossed federal land, there was also a right-of-way application to make to the Bureau of Land Management, and altogether the permits took the best part of a year.

Grace Holm’s regulators reviewed each filing before it was submitted.

“The state will accept some routine flaring while the well is being completed,” Priya said at one of the reviews, “and the federal deadlines have moved twice already. Legally speaking, we could do less than we’re planning to.”

“Legally, that’s true,” Grace said, “but our own standard doesn’t change just because theirs does. The first gas goes into the line, and if the line isn’t ready yet, the well will simply have to wait.”

Priya had expected that answer, and she had already allowed for it in her budget.

First gas

The rig that drilled the Bridger well ran on electricity from the grid. Its crews belonged to two Business Enterprises that shared a single lease and handed over to each other every Friday, so that each crew spent one week at the pad and the following week at home in the square, and nobody ever had to live out at the field.

Before completion began, the casing was cemented to a proved barrier and tested. On the morning the well was completed, its first gas went straight into the new gathering line without any flaring or venting, and Priya stood at the edge of the pad with her hands in her pockets, watching the pressure readings settle.

“For something this important,” she said, “it’s a remarkably quiet thing to watch.”

On the day the well was first drilled, the Bridger Trust had also set up and funded a separate trust that would eventually pay for plugging the well and for watching it after it closed, and that money was reserved for nothing else.

The line

By this time nine communities had wells in the prospect, and the corridor agreed at the conference proved its worth. Instead of nine small lines, a single trunk line ran along the agreed route, with each community owning its own section of it. Luis Ortega’s pipeline Business Enterprise submitted its proposal to each community separately, since each section was a decision for that community alone, and Bridger and four others approved it and licensed his business for their sections, while the rest chose other contractors. His business leased the Bridger section and charged published fees for carrying gas through it, with welded joints throughout and compressors that ran on electricity.

“If each of us had built our own line,” Marta told the Bureau 23 council afterwards, “we’d probably have paid three times as much for the same gas.”

“And we’d still own our own section, which is the part that matters most to me,” Daniel added.

Putting it back

Of all the stages, returning the carbon was the slowest, and the one watched most closely.

In Wyoming, the pore space deep underground belongs to whoever owns the surface above it. To form a storage unit, the community therefore needed agreements with the owners of at least eighty per cent of the pore space, followed by an order from the state commission. Ray Castillo’s business was licensed again for this work and spent two years on it, while Daniel’s trustees reviewed each agreement before the Trust signed. Most owners agreed fairly quickly once they understood that the payments were fair and the monitoring would be public, and the few who held out had their share of pore space left alone.

The injection well also needed a Class VI permit from the state environmental agency, which had issued its first such permits two decades earlier to the storage hub further west. The proposal to build and operate the well came from Hannah Cole, whose Business Enterprise was licensed once the origination rails had approved her plan. Bureau 23 helped with the application by supplying the community’s monitoring standard and its methane limit for the carbon dioxide stream, while Hannah spent a good deal of time studying the storage hub’s monitoring reports.

“They’ve been doing this for longer than we’ve existed,” she said, “and their data on how the plume moves through this sandstone is the best anyone has.”

The carbon dioxide itself came from the community’s own fuel cells, which produced it already concentrated and ready to be compressed and sent back down the return line. Before it went underground, the stream was tested against a published limit for methane, and any methane found in it was separated out and recompressed into the gas system.

There was a federal tax credit for storing carbon, and the Bridger plan took it into account. When a visitor once asked Marta what would happen if the credit were ever repealed, however, she shook her head.

“Then it would cost us a little more,” she said, “but we’d return the carbon all the same. It came out of that ground in the first place, so that’s where it ought to go back.”

The morning the sensor flagged

In the third winter of operation, at twelve minutes past four one February morning, a continuous monitor at the compressor station picked up a methane reading above the published threshold.

The Business Enterprise on duty isolated that section of the line within forty minutes, and by noon a technician had traced the problem to a cracked fitting on an instrument line, replaced it, and logged the repair. The leak was recorded as a failure, as the rules required, rather than being treated as an allowance or balanced against a better month.

When Bureau 18 published its reconciliation for the year, the event was listed by site and date, along with the time it had taken to isolate and repair. Tom Whitaker read it at his kitchen table, as he had read every year’s figures since the well was drilled.

The newcomer

Six years after the Bridger well came in, a new community was founded at Point of Rocks South, the fifty-first in the basin and the first of a new region. On the day it was founded, it received its share of the hinterland, calculated by the formula that the Council of Fifty had published and that each community had since adopted through its own amendment process.

Because the share came from the formula, the new community did not have to bargain with anyone for it, and none of the older communities was in a position to keep it out.

By then Marta Ruiz had long since left her presidency, which had ended on her birthday at the close of her term. She read about the new community’s share over breakfast one morning and sent a note to the Point of Rocks South Bureau 23 presidency, welcoming them to the basin.

“You’ll be given a great deal of advice at the conference,” she wrote. “Take whatever is useful to you, and remember that none of it binds you until your own council decides that it should.”

What the story shows

At no point in this story did the Council of Fifty own a lease, sign a permit, pay a bill, or operate a well. Its part was to compare conditions, coordinate a corridor, and publish a proposal and a formula. Nor did any community’s presidencies or bureaus do the work themselves. Every stage of it, from the prospecting through to the carbon return, was carried out by contractors whose business proposals had been approved through the community’s origination rails, who were then licensed for the work, and who leased what they needed from the community. The bureaus helped where they could, by opening records, supplying standards, and checking filings.

The Operating presidents brought the work forward, the trustees made sure that each community kept its own title and managed its own finances, and the regulators kept the work lawful, kept the conversation away from prices, and held the community to its own standard even where the law of the land asked for less. Throughout, every decision that mattered was made by each community at home.