Natural Gas - What it is and How to Extract it

Oil and gas veteran Steve Antry is the chairman and CEO of Eagle Energy Resources. A resident of Tulsa, OK, Steve Antry supervises the company’s natural gas exploration and extraction operations.

A fossil source of energy, natural gas is found deep beneath the surface of the earth. A colorless, odorless matter, it has many compounds, the largest of which is methane, which is made of carbon and hydrogen atoms (CH4). Other components of natural gas include natural gas liquids and nonhydrocarbon gases like water vapor.

Natural gas is formed by decaying processes that take millions of years. The remains of animals and plants that lived and died millions of years ago were gradually covered by thick layers of sand, silt, and rock both on the earth's surface and ocean floor. Over time, the pressure and heat from these layers turned the remains into coal, oil, and natural gas. Today, humans drill deep into the subsurface layers to extract fossil fuels and natural gas for use as energy.

To find natural gas, geologists study earth rock formations to locate sites that bear features consistent with areas where natural gas has been found, then use techniques like seismic surveys to know whether the resource could be present. Seismic surveys sometimes involve using thumper truck machines to pound the earth, sending seismic waves into the ground. These waves are then interpreted to determine the geology of the subsurface. If there is a possibility that natural gas is present, an exploration well is drilled.

The Blues Foundation

Based in Tulsa, OK, Steve Antry is the CEO and chairman of Eagle Resources Group. In addition to leading the company, which he founded in Tulsa in 2009, Steve Antry is a blues musician and a lifetime VIP of the Blues Foundation.

The Blues Foundation organizes awards and events to honor rising and established talent within the blues community, including a number of scholarships to encourage the continuation of the genre. In addition, it offers medical assistance to members of the community through the Handy Artists Relief Trust (HART Fund).

The HART Fund is dedicated to providing financial support for the medical concerns of blues musicians and their families. The blues community can contact the foundation directly for financial support pertaining to medical needs, including hearing, mental health, vision, and dental.

The Blues Foundation holds fundraisers to support the HART Fund. The group offers free health screening to blues musicians during these events throughout the year, such as the International Blues Challenge, which will be held in late January in 2021. The HART Fund also provides funerary and burial support.

Fracking - Dealing with the Waste Water Disposal Issue

Tulsa, OK resident Steve Antry is the founder and CEO of Eagle Resources Group, a crude oil and natural gas company engaged in the exploration, acquisition, development, and production of energy sources. Earlier, Eagle was involved in a program that pioneered horizontally drilling the Mississippi Lime Formation in Northwestern Oklahoma.

Similarly, other energy suppliers have found innovative ways to harvest resources with advanced completion techniques such as fracking. Developed as a way to unlock tight shales and other rock types (limestones and other carbonates) that are deep below the earth’s surface, fracking involves injecting high-pressure liquid that creates small fissures in the tight rocks. The purpose is to stimulate oil or natural gas production and this method can provide natural gas and oil producers with copious amounts of energy. But this practice creates, in many cases, a tremendous amount of produced saltwater from the targeted formations. This water is usually disposed of by reinjecting it back into lower porous rock formations. When the Oklahoma Corporation Commission shut down some specific saltwater wells across the state, the number of earthquakes decreased. In 2018, the state only experienced 154, in 2017, the number was 272, and in 2016 the number was 639. Every year since the Commission began reducing the number of saltwater disposal wells, the incidences of earthquakes has decreased.

The state has a history of earthquakes, but according to the United States Geological Survey, only between one and two percent of the earthquakes that happened were directly linked to fracking with the rest being connected with wastewater disposal, which has been corrected by industry self-policing as well as Oklahoma Corporation Commission oversight.