Pioneer Energy knows the industry has plenty of room to improve efficiency.
The company, based in Lakewood, Colorado, was recently selected for a series of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grants for the rollout of technology capable of delivering efficiency gains in two ways: emissions reduction and increased crude yield right at the well pad.
Pioneer plans to use the funds to help producers improve throughput of oil and gas, with the extra benefit of reducing one of the industry’s more visibly obvious problems—flaring.
Flaring grabs headlines. The practice can be seen from space, unlike the invisible release of other greenhouse gas emissions, said Joseph Palaia, the company’s vice president of business development. Cutting out the process improves a company’s image and its bottom line.
With the incoming Trump administration pledging to ease restrictions on emissions, Palaia expects less producer interest, and investment, in paying more to reduce emissions.
“But if it’s emissions reduction that also pays,” Palaia said, “then why wouldn’t you want to do it?”
Pioneer’s Emission Control Treater (ECT) technology improves crude production while also reducing emissions. The technology processes wellhead fluid, replacing traditional infrastructure such as phase separators. This closed system completely processes the crude, resulting in zero routine flaring with no need for atmospheric storage tanks. Pioneer says it can boost a well’s crude yield by 5% to 10%.
Pioneer started in the early 2010s making gas processing systems to do something with flared gas, Joseph Palaia, the company’s vice president of business development, told Hart Energy. It builds equipment at a factory in Lakewood.
“We’ve seen a lot of the inefficiency and what we view as the opportunity to turn that waste and that inefficiency into additional product,” he said. “We have developed a line of crude stabilization systems, essentially an entire surface facility on a skid. We can set this on an existing well pad or on a new site.”
Operators can monitor and control production from a centralized dashboard, reducing the number of trips to a wellsite.
The ECT can replace multiple systems designed to separate oil and gas, Palaia said.
“You've got a lot of inefficiency in the process because every time you have another pressure drop, you have another low-pressure gas stream that you generate, which means then you need compression for that gas stream to get it up to a sales line pressure,” he said. “And even after all of that, you still have crude molecules that are trapped in the gas and gas molecules that are trapped in the crude.”
The extra throughput comes from improving the separation of those gas and oil molecules while limiting the potential for emissions.
“Any place you have a connection point, a flange, a valve, you've got the potential for fugitive emissions,” he said. “And so we can replace all of that with refining technology that we've miniaturized and automated. We build in a factory environment, with a minimum amount of field labor required to install it and operate it. And it's 100% electric.”
Where electricity is not available, Pioneer makes a version of the system that uses a gas-fired heater.
The company received four awards from DOE, with funding going toward:
- A $10 million project to scale the ECT from pilot to a commercial scale of 2,500 bbl/d and deploy units with Bayswater Exploration & Production and Prairie Operating for six-month field trials in Colorado. Work has begun with expected field deployment in fourth-quarter 2025;
- A $6 million effort to adapt the 2,500-bbl/d ECT for use in processing sour crude oil. In addition to demonstration of emissions reduction, the system is projected to sweeten the crude down to low sulfur concentration of parts per million;
- A $5 million project to create mini-ECT systems as inexpensive, drop-in replacements for surface infrastructure at marginal wells. The technology will be demonstrated for 12 months on several sites operated by Diversified Energy in the Cotton Valley Basin; and
- $6 million project to convert flare gas to methanol in collaboration with Emvolon Inc., which has the exclusive rights to the technology. The technology will be demonstrated for 12 months in the Eagle Ford Shale.