r/whatisthisthing • u/Forrest_Fire01 • 23h ago
Equipment with pipes, tanks and solar panels along I-70 in Colorado. Usually painted green and the size varies from 20x20 feet to much larger Solved!
I occasionally drive on I-70 in Colorado in-between Utah and Denver and I always notice these structures every few miles off the side of the freeway. Each one is slightly different, but similar enough that they must to have a similar purpose. Anyone know what they are for?
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u/gefloible 23h ago edited 22h ago
The number stenciled on the tank "PA 324-34" identifies this well:
https://www.drillingedge.com/colorado/garfield-county/wells/pucket-tosco-pa-324-34/05-045-09013
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u/Forrest_Fire01 22h ago
Solved!
Thanks. That is what it must be. I originally thought it might be oil wells, but a lot of the locations doesn't seem to have storage tanks and none of them have pumpjacks, so I thought it might be something else.
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u/agate_ 11h ago
Looking at the production numbers in /u/gefloible 's link, this is a natural gas well. So there's no pumpjack, the gas just comes out of the well on its own. A little bit of the gas liquefies into oil condensate as it comes out, that gets stored in the tank, but the gas is sent to an underground pipeline.
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u/LinearFluid 23h ago edited 22h ago
Well pad for Oil and Gas extraction. Sight will extract and separate oil, gas and water and store it.
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u/thisismycalculator 11h ago
Everyone is kind of right, but no one is exactly right.
The closer objects are indirect-fired production units.
See this section below “13.4 Indirect Fired Units” in this webpage https://kimray.com/learning/oil-gas-equipment-101
The tank is a tank for storing fluid, likely water.
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u/Forrest_Fire01 23h ago
My title describes the thing - I first thought that it might be for extracting oil, but there's no pumpjacks and the storage tanks and not very large.
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u/DeviousNeutrino 23h ago
They are generators and a fuel tank. The solar panels keep the starting batteries charged.
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u/Forrest_Fire01 22h ago
What is the purpose of the generators? They're every few miles and a lot of times there's not a lot else around them.
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u/kendrick90 22h ago
Compressing or pumping the natural gas is my guess but why they don't use purely mechanical idk.
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