Powder River Basin Drawdown Updates
WSGS in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Buffalo Field Office is publishing an Open-File Report entitled “2013 Coalbed Natural Gas Regional Groundwater Monitoring Report, Powder River Basin, Wyoming.” The BLM has commissioned the WSGS to produce a series of updates for this project until 2015. The 2013 report presents data from BLM’s 119 groundwater monitoring wells and network in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (PRB) along with surrounding coalbed natural gas (CBNG) production data from the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, from 1993 through 2012.
CBNG production requires the extraction of water from subsurface coal seams. The BLM’s groundwater monitoring well network involves measuring water levels in CBNG producing zones and surrounding sandstone aquifers and providing data to monitor the effects of CBNG production on the groundwater resources in specific CBNG producing intervals of the PRB. The 2013 report will be available online in winter of 2014.
WSGS Contact, Seth Wittke.
