So how do you create the perfect ESG Bitcoin mining operation? Well, we talk to Mark Lancaster in an exclusive interview.

How do you create the perfect ESG Bitcoin mining operation? Mark Lancaster an exclusive interview

There are many people claiming that they know how to mine for Bitcoin using different techniques to gain the “ESG” status every investor wants. Well, Mark Lancaster, Vice President of Business Development, Broussard Energy, and I have an opportunity to talk about some different twists that are truly a one-stop-shop for an ESG Bitcoin mining operation. If you want to mine Bitcoin call Mark, and if you want to mine Bitcoin with an ESG solution still call Mark.

What is the ROI on your Bitcoin mine is one of the factors you need to look at early, and Mark has the tools and knowledge to get you good ROI data.

One of the topics we discussed is taking flared, or stranded gas and running generators to generate electricity for the Bitcoin miners. Well, add in the next steps to trap the exhaust and use the water through steam, and use the electricity to filter the water, and create hydrogen. Then turn around and run the hydrogen to fuel generators. A very nice closed ecosystem with a revenue source of Bitcoin.  This is an excellent representation of the types of ideas that will actually lead to carbon net-zero.

Please connect with Mark on LinkedIn here: Mark Lancaster

Thank you Mark for stopping by the ENB podcast, I had a blast and look forward to updates! I also loved your “Turning Black Gold Green” shirt and logo. That is a cool trademark to have.

 

“Turning Black Gold Green” TM Logo

Progen – One of Mark’s solution providers.

 

Automated Transcript in Processing and posting shortly.


Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Stuart Turley [00:00:03] Hello, everybody. Today is just an exciting day for me, I’m getting to visit with Mark Lancaster. He is just. He and I have been chit chatting before, my name is Stu Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group. This is the Energy News Beat podcast and Mark is the with Broussard energy and I hope I said that right.

Mark Lancaster [00:00:28] Broussard energy, Otherwise you’ll have a whole bunch of coon asses yelling.

Stuart Turley [00:00:32] But anyway. Well, Mark, thank you and you also have a trademark, this pretty interesting. What’s that trademark?

Mark Lancaster [00:00:38] Turn in black gold green with crypto.

Stuart Turley [00:00:41] This is pretty I think people can kind of get a glimpse of what we’re going to start talking about here in a second Mark. But I you when I, you and I, you’ve been liking a lot of my stuff on LinkedIn and I’ve seen your stuff for a long time.

Stuart Turley [00:00:56] You and I have 360 shared connections, but I’m a peon in the world of LinkedIn. You have 26,000 connections and I only have 2000, so again, I’m not worthy to hang with you. And I am so excited to hear you about your experience and what you’re doing on.

Stuart Turley [00:01:21] Mark, can you tell us a little bit of your background and how you got all of your knowledge, you still have your hair. I’m jealous.

Mark Lancaster [00:01:30] It’s part of I was told a long time ago that I know a little bit about a lot of stuff, and that makes me sound really smart. You know, But nothing that I really know is anything that is original thought from me.

Mark Lancaster [00:01:53] But I was told that you, any time you’re repeating something from someone the first two or three times you do it, you must give them credit but then after that you don’t. And so that’s why I sound smarter, because I’ve just repeated so many, so many times different people stuff I don’t have them give a credit anymore and I can make it look like it’s my original idea.

Stuart Turley [00:02:14] I’m taking a note on that because I’m going to be repeating everything you say, I’m going to watch this podcast four or five times. Does that count if I watch the podcast several times?

Mark Lancaster [00:02:25] No, no. You know, let’s see but I got into the oilfield working for my father in law. He had a system for compressing gas by taking a cylinder and putting it inside of the structure and pumping it. And so then as the pumping unit would do, this exercise is going up and down, it would also draw the plunger up and down and allow you to be able to reduce the back pressure on a well by moving the gas off and pushing it into a pipeline and thereby you can make more oil so that’s where I got into this.

Mark Lancaster [00:03:04] Then eventually I got into working at Baker Hughes doing Power Generation because once again taking natural gas and instead of just selling it for two or $3 and MCF converted it into something that’s more and more valuable, which at that point in time was electricity, you know and so I’ve been doing that for the past few years.

Mark Lancaster [00:03:26] And recently working with a company in Florida called Trojan, where they have a great reciprocal generator that, you know, is is everything and a lot of other power generation, is it. You know, but now, as we’ve gotten into the crypto space, it’s really just a perfect, perfect marriage with oilfield you know what because it’s, you know.

Mark Lancaster [00:03:53] 30 years ago, you know, well, you and I are pretty old, so you remember when when Jed shot that hill on the Beverly Hill Hillbillies, you know, the oil started bubbling out of the ground. Well, nobody cared yourselves with the gas that came along with it they just collected the oil and the gas just went wherever.

Mark Lancaster [00:04:15] You know, then back in the nineties when Bill Clinton set up the some of the Quadros specifications for EPA where you had to start gathering that gas.

Stuart Turley [00:04:25] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:04:26] Then it got to be where okay, now we’re now we’re going to have to take this waste stream and really gather it or or quite honestly, the oil pretend we’re gathering it, you know, I mean, because there was never really all that efficient, you know. So then that’s where friends like Paul Gibbs and Extreme Tank Technologies, they got to where they can gather in a much more efficient nature, you know.

Mark Lancaster [00:04:49]  But then you even move to recent days you know and and just gathering the gas is problematic because in order to gather the gas and you have to have a market for the gas. And in order to have the market for the gas, you had to have a pipeline, you know, where that you could actually, you know, put it in the pipeline, let the pipeline send it to a gas plant and where it would be used.

Mark Lancaster [00:05:15] You know, And so companies started coming up with what they called virtual pipelines, which was basically drill a well, you get gas, you put it into a tanker truck and then your truck the gas to a midstream or pipeline after one one close to you, which is still pretty, pretty expensive and you are getting full value for your money.

Mark Lancaster [00:05:41] But with crypto, the oil industry can now drill a well anywhere they want to, right? Regardless of whether there’s a pipeline or not, simply because it doesn’t matter I mean, because they can on that same location.

Mark Lancaster [00:05:57] Now turn that gas into electricity that they can use on their site for drilling or whatever they want to in eliminate using diesel so they have a much cleaner site with less emissions. But then they can also take the rest of that electricity, convert it into crypto and greatly increase their profitability at the same time as being very environmentally green.

Stuart Turley [00:06:24] You know, it’s pretty funny, that is a great little system that you just talked about instead of flaring the gas, using the gas for electricity. And I’m just sitting here thinking Liberty Frack has a whole electric fleet. You could probably run part of that off of that flared gas or not flared gas into those generators and run the electric frack fleet.

Mark Lancaster [00:06:49] Well, you know, that’s what you would think and that’s what people you know, when I was at Baker Hughes, I knew what they thought, too. But the problem is flared gas, by definition, is not typically a long term.

Stuart Turley [00:07:03] Right,.

Mark Lancaster [00:07:04] Deal. You know, you might flare gas for 20, 30, 40 days but in in the regulatory nature, you’re supposed to not flare it for a long period of time so it’s not sustainable,. You know, And so that’s where those virtual pipeline companies came along, because companies like Liberty frack US well service, they would go and want to do electric fracking, but they wouldn’t have the gas supply from just the flare,.

Mark Lancaster [00:07:34] So they would have to bring gas to them. And now all of a sudden, instead of it being extremely economical to electric frack, now they’re getting we’re now hole in the gas and they’re just more expensive, you know I mean, it’s still going to be less expensive than diesel and much better for the environment.

Stuart Turley [00:07:53] Let’s talk around, though, for a a Bitcoin mining solution coming off of the flaring gas. If you were we were talking before the show and that is a pipeline cost X number dollars. What’s the ROI features on this solution?

Mark Lancaster [00:08:11] Well, the recent example I just had last week was was a gentleman was. You know, wanting to drill a well, I guess it was close to Waco, Texas. You know, and they’re looking at drilling this well. And it was going to make about a 100 MCF a day Gas. That was our expectation is vertical well, so it’s not going to be all that prolific and and make, you know, 60, 80, 100 barrels of oil.

Stuart Turley [00:08:40] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:08:40] You know but because they are going to make 100 MCF a day gas they are going to have to do something with it. And the typical way to do something with that would be to run a pipe to a pipeline and that way you would sell the gas into the midstream.

Mark Lancaster [00:08:58] Well, the nearest pipelines four miles away and their cost to do all of that, getting the right of ways on the land. You know, they’re looking at 800, $900,000. Well, you know, a hundred year for gas is going to gross maybe $150,000 a year in revenues.

Stuart Turley [00:09:20] Wow.

Mark Lancaster [00:09:21] So If you’re going to spend $1,000,000 to make 150,000, that’s not really great economics, you know. So in these days and time. You can now drill that will take that hundred MCF the gas and turn it into Bitcoin. Not even worry about the pipeline.

Stuart Turley [00:09:41] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:09:41] Instead of making $160,000 a year on selling 100 MCF of gas, you can take a $1,000,000, making it in Bitcoin.

Stuart Turley [00:09:51] Whoa, whoa, whoa. You said a million. Yeah. Now, let’s see I went to Oklahoma State, but I can even do that math, so that’s pretty darn cool.

Mark Lancaster [00:10:01] Yeah. I mean, you know, and what happens is that for Bitcoin, you know, it might cost a million two for all the equipment from the miners and the power generation and stuff. You know, if you finance it, which is one of the things that we do, if you lease all the equipment, well, now you’re leasing maybe $400,000 a year of equipment that you can write off. But you’re grossing, you know, six, seven year net and six or 700,000 a year in profits. You know, and.

Stuart Turley [00:10:31] I call that a real thing.

Mark Lancaster [00:10:33] Well, it it to me, you know, oil’s over 90 bucks and there’s going to be a lot of operators who have had permits that have been on the shelf that they didn’t want to drill because they didn’t want to spend the money to get the gas pipelines.

Mark Lancaster [00:10:49] Well, now, like, they just they just come to us and we basically turnkey the application word that now the oil company can have their own bit mine. You know, we just had a phone call today from one of the big six oil companies.

Stuart Turley [00:11:05] Yeah.

Mark Lancaster [00:11:06] And they’ve got six locations that, you know, it just makes so much sense spell C.E.N.T.S To do this as opposed to try to deal with the environmental problem of flaring or venting or running new pipelines, etc..

Stuart Turley [00:11:26] This brings up an interesting question, and that is you talk about the folks that already have their leases that they have not drilled, but you still have regulations around that. How do you get your regulation solved?

Mark Lancaster [00:11:41] Well, I mean, the main regulation you have is usually an air permit. Right. You know, and so the air permit, you know. Like the biggest emitter of emissions is going to be however, you’re generating the power using a turbine or using a reserve generator or whatever.

Mark Lancaster [00:11:59] And those those technologies have been set up where the GPE can easily exceed whatever emission permit standards you have to hit. So that makes it really simple, you know, and it becomes a very viable way to guarantee to the regulatory agencies that you’re in compliance.

Stuart Turley [00:12:19] So you’re saying 100 MCF on that? Well, that you’re doing what’s an average well, that the big boys? Or even the small guys? Because this sounds like something even the small guys could afford to really get into and have a decent ROI. What’s the MCF that you would recommend for a Bitcoin mine to drop on one of your rigs in that solution?

Mark Lancaster [00:12:44] I’m a salesman. So. So my answer to that is it depends.

Stuart Turley [00:12:51] Okay.

Mark Lancaster [00:12:52] Yeah. And it, you know like in reality, there are companies like EOG who is very basically putting a Bitcoin operation on every well they have.

Stuart Turley [00:13:04] Nice.

Mark Lancaster [00:13:05] Be it ten MCF of gas or a thousand MCF of gas simply because. Instead of selling gas for 4 or $5 of MCF.

Stuart Turley [00:13:16] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:13:16] Why not convert it into 30 or $40 worth of Bitcoin. I mean, there just makes no sense to sell it to sell something for a 10th of what you can sell at some other way. You know, I mean, if you’re going to go to trade in your car, you want to trade it in if somebody is going to give you a thousand bucks for it, are you going to go across the street and get rid of it for $30,000? I mean, which, you know, how how hard is that to make that choice? You know,.

Mark Lancaster [00:13:47] And the biggest problem right now in the auto industry is they don’t have the knowledge or the or how it would work. And that’s where we come in from a turnkey standpoint, we just do all the work for them and we set it up and it’s pretty much automated.

Stuart Turley [00:14:02] So if I’m a let’s just say that I’m a name AMP, doesn’t matter what size, one rig, two rigs, three rigs and I’m starting to roll through this. And I need to find out the calculations and I need to find a buy in cost and then an ROI. I call Mark and say, here’s my here’s my all my stuff and you can give me the numbers right there.

Mark Lancaster [00:14:26] Yeah. You tell us the BTU content of your gas, you tell us the volume of your gas, and from there I can do it. I’ve got these neat little calculators and they’ll show you how much profit you’re going to make.

Stuart Turley [00:14:43] And and so the miners I really had fun looking at your the ones that you’re using for your turnkey that you just roll in a trailer that’s got all the servers and it just it rocks and rolls.

Mark Lancaster [00:14:55] Yeah. You know, and, and it’s just a computer and it’s not like it’s not like it’s doing anything than just sitting, just like these computers that were sitting on our. It just sits there and runs.

Stuart Turley [00:15:09] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:15:09] And, you know, as long as it doesn’t have any hiccups to it were if it gets too hot or too cold or too sandy, you’re the environment’s a problem you know, it’s just going to operate. And it’s just going to create money and keep on keep on making money, you know and so what.

Stuart Turley [00:15:29] Are some of the problems that you’ve seen with an EMP as you come into some of these pads? Just because sometimes, you know, being in the field there are problems, and you’ve got a good group of folks that work with you. Can you just tell us any kind of pain points that people have had as they put these in?

Mark Lancaster [00:15:48] I think the biggest problem you run into is whatever the environment is that you’re going to be at, like out here in West Texas. For example, in west Texas, you know, because we’re dusty, we’ve got a desert environment, you have to make sure that the air that’s surrounding these bit miners stays clean about dust,.

Mark Lancaster [00:16:10] You know, And so a new technology came out called immersion cooling, we’re now the miners, instead of just sitting on a rack in a container, they’ll sit in a vessel of oil that’s a special oil. That as the miner gets hot, that he is absorbed by the oil. And then you pull the oil off and you take the heat out.

Stuart Turley [00:16:36] Kind of like a radiator.

Mark Lancaster [00:16:38] Yeah. And this way it allows the miners to operate at a higher level of efficiency because they create more heat. But they’re not going to be worried about getting a dirt and stuff in them because they’re more in an enclosure.

Stuart Turley [00:16:51] In computers. I used to work for small company Intel and dust and power and heat were the ones that, you know, when you turn your servers on and off that killed them your desktop up and down, killing them.

Stuart Turley [00:17:09] So it was the the electrical coming in and out, heat and dust were the number one and two killers of PCs and servers.

Mark Lancaster [00:17:18] Yeah.

Stuart Turley [00:17:18] So it sounds like you guys have already got those two killers nailed down.

Mark Lancaster [00:17:24] Yeah. I mean, it just depends on, you know, because there’s two way ways you do mine or you either put them in an air cooled environment or you put them in an immersion environment. And the immersion is, I guess is really only come out in the last couple of years, you know,.

Mark Lancaster [00:17:38] But the miners, for the most part, some of these big projects we work on hundred, 200 megawatt projects.

Stuart Turley [00:17:46] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:17:48] There. Just, you know, you just set arrow containers out there and you have guys walk up and down and they take a look at them and, you know, and even now the with the software to that, we will look at them remotely and say, hey, you know, Miner 600 is having a little problem I’ll go look at it. You know.

Stuart Turley [00:18:08] Right. Now what areas you we know the Permian. Do you do anything up in the Powder River or anything over in the Haynesville or up in the Appalachian area?

Mark Lancaster [00:18:22] Yes, I agree. I mean, currently we’re working on projects in the in the bayous of Louisiana.

Stuart Turley [00:18:32] Okay.

Mark Lancaster [00:18:33] Out in the deserts of California, out in the mountains of North Dakota, out in the deserts of North Africa.

Stuart Turley [00:18:41] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:18:41] And ah.

Stuart Turley [00:18:42] Also we do in North Africa, too.

Mark Lancaster [00:18:44] Yeah. We got we got one of our partners got projects in Sweden, you know, So, I mean, I mean, there really is no no where that you can’t do bitcoin mining.

Stuart Turley [00:18:58] Right

Mark Lancaster [00:18:58] It’s always going to come back to power I mean because for example, you know, last year China decided, well, we’re not going to let any Bitcoin miners anymore you guys get out of the country.

Stuart Turley [00:19:09] Right?

Mark Lancaster [00:19:10] Okay. So they they all started running to different places where they could find cheap power a lot of them went to Kazakhstan,.

Stuart Turley [00:19:17] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:19:17] All of a sudden, Kazakhstan had problems and the government kicked them all out.

Stuart Turley [00:19:21] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:19:21] Well, now now the Kazakhstan guys are going to go to Russia because that’s where they had cheap power so you can’t go to Russia no more.

Stuart Turley [00:19:29] I wouldn’t want to go to Russia.

Mark Lancaster [00:19:32] Yeah. So. So now that’s where everybody’s coming back to the United States. And it’s mainly because we have all of this gas, natural gas that’s available.

Stuart Turley [00:19:43] Wow.

Mark Lancaster [00:19:43] We have a lot of natural gas that’s stranded.

Stuart Turley [00:19:47] Right

Mark Lancaster [00:19:48] Which is the biggie, you know, because now, I mean, there’s a lot of fields. You just think about this, the oil industry and in the U.S. is, what, 100 years old?

Stuart Turley [00:19:59] Yep.

Mark Lancaster [00:20:00] You know, and. Others well that were drilled seven or eight years ago that are still operating, still going well, but those wells probably never had a pipeline even came close to them. So they just have gas that they are venting and have been venting for decades. And that’s grandfathered in and that’s that’s good. Well, that those types of fields can easily be.

Stuart Turley [00:20:23] Converted. Up in Pennsylvania in that area. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were saying that there were so many really, really good wells. But just because of that point you brought up a little bit ago on that pipeline, they weren’t able to even think about putting a rig on there, putting a well, because the take away was not even there.

Stuart Turley [00:20:51] And so now this is a solution for anybody that’s in up in the Pennsylvania area. They can go after those wells that they couldn’t have gone after before.

Mark Lancaster [00:21:03] You know, and another aspect of that is that one of the waste streams of Bitcoin mining is the heat that comes off the power generation.

Stuart Turley [00:21:13] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:21:14] Well, we can take that heat and eliminate another cost for an oil company, which is the produce water. You know, for example, in Pennsylvania, you know, like when you drill a well and you produce water, you can’t dispose of that water in the state of Pennsylvania, you have to truck it to Ohio or somewhere else.

Stuart Turley [00:21:33] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:21:34] So at a cost of $8 a barrel.

Stuart Turley [00:21:37] Ooh.

Mark Lancaster [00:21:38] So but by using the exhaust. You know, when I was at Baker Hughes, we figured that off one of our 30 megawatt turbines, we could evaporate 30,000 barrels of water a day.

Stuart Turley [00:21:53] Holy smokes. That’s cool.

Mark Lancaster [00:21:56] You know.

Stuart Turley [00:21:56] Cook your water off and you’re off and run it.

Mark Lancaster [00:21:59] Well, and see and then you can even wind up doing it or that you evaporate the water,.

Stuart Turley [00:22:05] Right

Mark Lancaster [00:22:05] And then you condense the steam back to pure water and you use that water for agriculture, you know, hemp farm, you know, I mean I mean, there’s variety. So you can get into a lot of other things. You know, it’s not just eliminating the flare gas you know, you can make this a multiple aspect project.

Stuart Turley [00:22:32] And it seems like, I’ve always said that there’s no, ESG does not exist without accountability. And what Mark you’re describing are measurable things that people can say, here’s why we are doing We are turning oil to green, right? Or gold turning black, gold, green right? And it’s because of accountability in ESG. Greg Yeah, it might be.

Mark Lancaster [00:23:02] I mean, there are specific things that you can point to that say, yeah, I invested in the oil well, but what what are we or negatively impacting the environment. You know, we’re we’re taking all of our produced water and we’re not just disposing of it down a hole. We’re taking that water to do for a sustainable garden, we’re doing this for the agricultural, we’re putting it into a greenhouse for doing.

Mark Lancaster [00:23:29] You know, there are just so many different things that you can look at. You know, once you turn, you know, the whole key is turning the natural gas into electricity, because once you have it in electricity, you can do a bunch of things, you know, And it’s just like one of the biggest emission items in the world are oil tanks.

Stuart Turley [00:23:54] Right? Oh, yeah.

Mark Lancaster [00:23:55] You know, and like in Pennsylvania, they have all these oil storage tanks. Well, when Bill Clinton came along with Plato back in the in the nineties and said, hey, you have to gather that gas, they they really weren’t all that concerned with how they did it you know.

Mark Lancaster [00:24:11] But now, you know, through tools like you had on your show the other day with Paul Gibbs, you can gather gas right off the top layer of that oil and now it’s high BTU gas and we can go now pull that gas running in and create electricity and turn it right into Bitcoin so we can eliminate one of the biggest emission problems in the world.

Stuart Turley [00:24:35] Isn’t that crazy?

Mark Lancaster [00:24:37] You know, and people look at those tanks all the time and they go, oh, well, they got a roof on them, so they’re covered. Well, that’s not that’s, that’s not what they work.

Stuart Turley [00:24:45] Now I, I and selfishly Paul Pogba has absolutely a wonderful explanation on this whole thing. So fortunately, it’s going to air this next Monday or Tuesday and then you’re going to air probably Wednesday or Thursday.

Stuart Turley [00:25:04] So it’s really going to be kind of fun that we recorded these, you know, right after each other on this. And I love learning about those floating the floats and everything else in it. It was really exciting because I drove by Cushing. I know all those folks up there and it was kind of like I didn’t realize it was that much.

Mark Lancaster [00:25:29] Well, you know, and the most interesting thing and I told you earlier, you know, with Bitcoin mining, the whole goal is where can you get inexpensive fuel.

Stuart Turley [00:25:39] Right

Mark Lancaster [00:25:39] So that’s why people looked at flare gas because they’re just burning it, you know, then you look at stranded gas, you had nowhere to go. Well, the emissions off of a tank.

Stuart Turley [00:25:49] Yeah.

Mark Lancaster [00:25:50] Is free. Because you’re just giving that to God, you know, and he doesn’t really want it, you know.

Stuart Turley [00:25:57] So it just dawned on me as Mark, as you were pointing this out, is that a tank, those big gotten pack tanks sit there They’re being used all the time. So it’s not just a matter of bringing it into a well that may or may not be shut off. You can have a more permanent, steady source of power sitting in one of those tanks. Is that a fair statement?

Mark Lancaster [00:26:23] Yeah, we made the math on it and, you know, we’re like a 60,000 barrel tank. That’s what what Paul was talking about was like, you have these oil pipelines all over the country,.

Stuart Turley [00:26:34] Right

Mark Lancaster [00:26:34] Well, the oil pipeline has to be pressured up to like £1,000 to push the fluid.

Stuart Turley [00:26:41] Yeah,.

Mark Lancaster [00:26:41] You know, about every hundred miles or so you’ve got to have a place you can depressurize that line. So that more fluid can be added, so it can keep on going on the pipeline. Well, every time we depressurize the line, you exhaust gas.

Stuart Turley [00:26:59] Right?

Mark Lancaster [00:26:59] And on a 60,000 barrel tank, that’s 12 1300 empty f gas that goes to the atmosphere.

Stuart Turley [00:27:10] Over what period Mark?

Mark Lancaster [00:27:12] A day.

Stuart Turley [00:27:18] But you could power a small city out of that bad dog

Stuart Turley [00:27:20] Yeah, you know, but. But because there’s no way that they’re required to capture it. That’s why Paul’s technology is pretty cool because he can just sit there underneath those roofs and just pull all that gas out.

Mark Lancaster [00:27:34] You know, but then you get into the problem, just like with stranded gas on an oil well, usually these tank farms or what they’re they’re in remote locations. You don’t normally have them right in the middle of a city. So so now great. Now, Paul’s technology allows you to capture the gas. What the hell are you going to do with it?

Stuart Turley [00:27:52] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:27:53] Well, you turn it into Bitcoin.

Stuart Turley [00:27:57] See what a what a great all. A one stop shop they call Mark, they can get their numbers, they can get their ESG, they can get their accountability, they can get their solution if it’s a tank, you get contacts and you can sit there and do The Sopranos and go, Hey, I know people. So this is a one stop shop, man. I love this. This is about as cool as it gets for the oilfields.

Mark Lancaster [00:28:26] Well, you know, and, you know, the oil field will not normally do anything unless it’s economic.

Stuart Turley [00:28:33] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:28:34] That’s that’s that’s the main thing you know, they’re going to go go wherever the economics are.

Stuart Turley [00:28:40] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:28:40] You know, And then when you can take 200 MCF of gas and instead of getting a check for $350,000 at the end of the year, get one for over 2 million, you know, that’s economical.

Stuart Turley [00:28:52] Oh, you bet. Yeah. You know, so that’s nuts. So what do you see coming around the corner for, if I say this correct, Broussard energy. How how do you say that? Broussard?

Mark Lancaster [00:29:06] Broussard. Broussard Energy.

Stuart Turley [00:29:09] What we’ll see coming around the corner there?

Mark Lancaster [00:29:11] Well, there there is a lot of new technologies even where that, you know, we’re looking at hydrogen, you know, sampling because we have the capabilities of converting all of our reserve generators that run on natural gas now, we can run them on hydrogen.

Stuart Turley [00:29:29] Huh?

Mark Lancaster [00:29:30] So now, you know, we get back to where I was talking about taking the exhaust from a power generator and evaporating water. Well, once I evaporate the water and I turn it into steam and I condense the steam back to pure water.

Stuart Turley [00:29:47] You can use it on a hydrogen plant

Mark Lancaster [00:29:48] Now you might be like, Well, I use electricity from the generator, do the block electrolysis on the pure water, create hydrogen, and I can do all of that out of stranded or flared gas, you know, and.

Stuart Turley [00:30:04] That’s almost a complete eco system for power.

Mark Lancaster [00:30:10] Yeah,.

Stuart Turley [00:30:10] That is weird, that is a complete. We need to do I need to have my graphics team do a graphic of this because that is absolutely, you take the gas, you can turn it here, steam it, come around, make hydrogen, burn that. I mean, that’s almost a self-sustaining fusion nuclear reactor. I mean.

Mark Lancaster [00:30:33] I mean. I mean that is the problem with with evaporating produced water.

Stuart Turley [00:30:38] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:30:38] Is is most people don’t want you to put it on the ground because they don’t believe it’s clean.

Stuart Turley [00:30:43] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:30:44] Well, that’s fine. We we don’t want to we don’t really have to condence them it’s clean because now we’re just going to run it into another tank. You know, you do electrolysis, make hydrogen on it now we take the hydrogen, now we can sell it to anybody wanted.

Stuart Turley [00:31:01] Now, here’s another thought, because there are once a if I understand this correct, correct me if I’m wrong, but you can run hydrogen through a natural gas line as long as the turbines are set up that way. Is that a fair if I understand that, or.

Mark Lancaster [00:31:19] Once again, I guess it depends. I don’t know. I don’t I don’t know that answer. I don’t know.

Stuart Turley [00:31:24] You know, if we’re going to believe that there’s a certain percentage of hydrogen that we can drop in to that gas and that would be a way cool thing to pick a location that you had a take away that would support hydrogen and natural gas. Boy, I could see my head spinning on this bad dog.

Mark Lancaster [00:31:45] And there are multiple companies that also do the same virtual pipeline where that, you know, they, you know, transport the hydrogen, you know, but for for our company like an Amazon or all these companies want to run on hydrogen you know the thing they look at is typically if you’re going to create hydrogen it use more electricity to create it then the electric electricity value that hydrogen can produce.

Mark Lancaster [00:32:14] So it all always gets backed into how cheaply you can make the electricity that you use for your process,.

Stuart Turley [00:32:22] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:32:22] So by getting free water from an oil company by taking their waste stream of produced water.

Stuart Turley [00:32:32] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:32:32] And using excess electricity from their stranded gas that youcreated. You can do all that stuff. You know, I mean, then you could run some profits in a bitcoin center.

Stuart Turley [00:32:46] I’ll tell you what, I get so excited about this kind of a conversation because it is turning all of a sudden. If everybody did this merger, we would not have the ESG problem or the bad name that the oil get.

Stuart Turley [00:33:01] Now, I’m going to be honest, the oil and gas companies did not for years do it right now they are. I mean, they are now getting into that area and not all the countries in the world do things the way the U.S. operators now do.

Stuart Turley [00:33:19] So, I mean, take a look at Russia and Saudi Arabia and all these others. They don’t have the same rules and regulations and some of them pretty darn polluting, as we say in Texas, right?

Mark Lancaster [00:33:32] Yeah. You know, and so, I mean, that’s just where, you know, like everybody in the oilfield has always tried to be as environmentally conscious as possible. You know, and and when you take oil, which is in our organic substance to begin with.

Stuart Turley [00:33:52] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:33:52] You know, people want to eat organically, well, oils, it’s as organic as it gets you know, and, you know, and.

Stuart Turley [00:34:02] Turn dinosaurs into gold.

Mark Lancaster [00:34:04] Well, you know, I mean, it’s just fertilizer that was just linear compaction that, you know, turn into something else. You know but the problem happens is that when man messes with the organic oil too much, then they create H2F. They introduce other bad things to it.

Stuart Turley [00:34:22] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:34:23] You know, and then through the process of pulling oil out of reservoirs that have brine water in there, they everything starts mixing. And then you had the brine water comes to surface and now is the brine water. You know, when you see an oil spill, so to speak, and on the ground, the oil isn’t what kills anything is going to be the brine water.

Mark Lancaster [00:34:48] I mean, if you had, you know, like they’ve had that happen out here in West Texas, where, you know, oil spilled on on a cotton field.

Stuart Turley [00:34:55] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:34:55] It was just it was just clean oil. They had no H20, no.

Stuart Turley [00:34:59] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:35:00] Got water in it, You know, that was became the farmer’s best for, you know, just got all that natural fertilizer.

Stuart Turley [00:35:08] Well, do you remember just a little while ago when they had all the cargo ships in the bay and in California and one of the cargo ships drug an anchor man over a pipeline. Everybody flipped out, even though it did not put out that much oil. People heard oil leak and flipped out.

Mark Lancaster [00:35:28] Yeah,.

Stuart Turley [00:35:29] Because that’s what everybody thinks is that it is incredibly bad I mean, the Exxon Valdez ruined it for everybody. But, you know, you sit back and take a look, I did not realize it was that portion of it that was hazardous.

Mark Lancaster [00:35:42] What mine. But even the Exxon Valdez, you know, like that’s the best fishing land in the world right now. Simply because all of that oil fell down to the bottom and the plants and plankton and, you know, wherever you have plankton, you’re going to have little fish.

Stuart Turley [00:35:59] Right

Mark Lancaster [00:35:59] And when you have little fish, you get bigger fish and wherever you get bigger fish, you get bigger fish.

Stuart Turley [00:36:04] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:36:05] So so.

Stuart Turley [00:36:07] I you know, this is so encouraging because I have really enjoyed this and Mark, we are going to have your LinkedIn information. We’re going to have your website so we’re going to make sure that anybody can get ahold of you. And when we push this out, we’re going to tag you and we want people to find you with this all this information. Mark So again, you got the last word. Give us the last word that closes out here.

Mark Lancaster [00:36:33] Well. Oil field can be as green as it wants, you know, And it might be green, you know, economically friendly, environmentally friendly, you know, And and now through using things like Bitcoin, they can really be very viable I mean, taking a small little well, small operator and and allowing them to reap the benefits of the new modern technology, I think is a pretty cool thing.

Mark Lancaster [00:37:08] So. We work on projects like this all the time and oh, and I’ll throw one more thing, you know, because oil price has gotten up a lot, right? You know, and you now have more operators that want to. Drill oil. So even in those operators, what they’re having a problem with is they’re making all this gas while the gas plants are at capacity.

Stuart Turley [00:37:31] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:37:33] And there’s never going to you know, nobody’s going to get more gas plants approved through Congress or whatever right now. So now you get into the same problem that you might be have access to pipeline.

Stuart Turley [00:37:46] Right.

Mark Lancaster [00:37:47] But the pipeline being full, you can’t put more in there, but now you can take that stranded gas that becomes stranded gas and you can sell it into Bitcoin and make a profit and they can create the oil and make the $100 a barrel oil, etc., etc.. So there’s a lot of ways to skin that cat you know, and by bringing Bitcoin into it, you just add, you know, six or seven different more ways to do it.

Stuart Turley [00:38:13] Fantastic! And I can’t wait because I want to have a Bitcoin roundtable with you and Gary and bring all that back in because there’s just a ton. I just wrote down all these other questions. We’re not done yet. Mark, Sorry, I’m going. I’m going to burn you up with another episode or two here. So again, thank you very much. Look forward to seeing you on the next one.

Mark Lancaster [00:38:35] All right. Thank you. Howdy. From West Texas.

 

About Stu Turley 3226 Articles
Stuart Turley is President and CEO of Sandstone Group, a top energy data, and finance consultancy working with companies all throughout the energy value chain. Sandstone helps both small and large-cap energy companies to develop customized applications and manage data workflows/integration throughout the entire business. With experience implementing enterprise networks, supercomputers, and cellular tower solutions, Sandstone has become a trusted source and advisor.   He is also the Executive Publisher of www.energynewsbeat.com, the best source for 24/7 energy news coverage, and is the Co-Host of the energy news video and Podcast Energy News Beat. Energy should be used to elevate humanity out of poverty. Let's use all forms of energy with the least impact on the environment while being sustainable without printing money. Stu is also a co-host on the 3 Podcasters Walk into A Bar podcast with David Blackmon, and Rey Trevino. Stuart is guided by over 30 years of business management experience, having successfully built and help sell multiple small and medium businesses while consulting for numerous Fortune 500 companies. He holds a B.A in Business Administration from Oklahoma State and an MBA from Oklahoma City University.