Blaise Energy Uses Well Head Gas to Power First Commercial CNG Production Plant in the Bakken Demonstrating Alternative Uses for Flare Gas

Blaise Energy announced they are using flare gas to supply the electrical power for a major oil operator producing CNG fuel. Blaise successfully paralleled five natural gas powered generators providing one megawatt of power for the oil operator's CNG compressor.  The CNG alternative fuel is being used to power bi-fuel generators at drilling rig sites reducing the oil producer's diesel costs and site emissions. The project also demonstrates how large gas volumes, contributing to the massive flaring in the Bakken, can be monetized and reduced.  Blaise's gas powered paralleled generation equipment automatically adjusts power output to meet the plant's load demand and on-site electrical loads using proprietary equipment set-up and configuration.

Blaise CEO, Mark Wald, said, "We have long been evangelizing the use of alternative solutions to reduce flaring in the Bakken and are excited to be utilizing this otherwise wasted resource to power this project."

Blaise supplies a critical component for an end-to-end well head gas utilization solution which consumes approximately 850,000 cubic feet of well head gas per day. The configuration can be scaled to over 1.1 million cubic feet per day which is more than the average individual flare size of the largest 200 flares in the Bakken comprising 60% of flared gas. There are over 3,000 flares burning in the Bakken.

Mr. Wald emphasized, "This is a highly repeatable modular solution that can be deployed at individual well sites as needed and scaled to address specific gas volumes and mixes."

These solutions capture gas when there is no existing gathering pipeline or when the existing infrastructure is already at capacity and cannot move the gas to local plants or regional pipelines. "We converted our own field service trucks to run on CNG Bakken gas at about 25% of our previous fuel costs," said Wald. 

The North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources and oil and gas industry group associations indicate 29% of the gas in North Dakota is flaring and over 50% of gas flared in the Bakken is connected to a gas pipeline gathering system.