Oil and gas leader speaks at Payette Chamber luncheon

“Hiring local is a big thing for us and all of our field guys … they’re all local,” he said.

Brown described Payette County as being considered “the final frontier” for oil and gas exploration by him and his colleagues.

“I’ve been coming here for years and I always wanted to have some opportunity to do business up here,” said Brown. “We’re akin to gold miners, in that there’s a lot of rumor mill when discoveries are made and people get all amped up … In our business, it’s check, check, check, re-check.”

Brown explained that his company uses what is called 3-D seismic surveying, which it began deploying nine years ago.

“We shoot [sound waves] in a grid, so instead of just one single line we do a grid and we can build what we call a 3-D map,” he said “It’s by no means perfect, but it’s a lot better than the picture we build with one line.”

He told those present about his grandfather’s efforts to drill wells, using a box with a set of electrodes sticking out of it to”detect” the best places to drill.

“It had a battery in it, but it didn’t do anything,” Brown recalled. “He drilled a bunch of wells, but it was pure randomness. That’s the way oil and gas was found back in the day, they just drilled, drilled, drilled. But as they drilled more wells, they were able to start building pictures” of where resources were to be found.

Campo & Poole of Ontario is a distributor of the company’s products.

According to Brown, the U.S. is the “most explored” area in the world when it comes to oil and gas discovery. His company didn’t drill its first well in Payette County until 2014.

He noted that Idaho Power’s natural gas-powered Langley Gulch Power Plant in New Plymouth uses 50 MCF of natural gas a day, 8 MCF of which is supplied by Snake River Oil and Gas according to Brown. 

The reason they built that … plant over there is because they had that ready access to gas right there, and it was out of the way,” he said. “They got that thing built and permitted really quickly. Y’all being locals, I don’t know how much opposition [there was]; I never saw any.”

Langley Gulch was commissioned in June 2012.

During this luncheon, Brown mentioned that two new wells being drilled this month in Payette County — known as Irvin 1-19 and Barlow 3-14.

He explained that royalties paid to owners is dependent on the price paid by companies who purchase the oil and gas his company mines. Near Payette, he said there are approximately 300 mineral owners being paid royalties.

“Our price goes up and down every day, and some days it can drop as much as … $4. It has really been volatile since COVID and since the war in Ukraine. Our condensate prices right now are $85, sold in barrels” as of Sept. 6.

Noteworthy is that according to Brown, the Fruitland city government is a mineral owner, with its royalties being used to help fund its water treatment facilities.

Regarding safety at the company’s wells, Brown told the Argus following the luncheon that he has not seen any major safety incidents since beginning operations in Payette County.

Snake River Oil & Gas is wholly owned by Weiser-Brown Oil Co., which operates in seven states. Brown described Idaho as being the most regulated of the states he operates in.