A friend of mine is wanting to sell 150 acres in W. Virginia. It is wooded, secluded, is boundaried by two creeks that lead to the Ohio, has a nice cabin that is heated by natural gas from one of the two producing wells. If I could find a reliable natural gas generator or a sterlng engine generator, this would be ideal. Maybe even convert an automobile to run on NG. This sure sounds like something that I would be interested in.
Sounds cool..... the only stirling gens I've seen on the web are very large (55kw), or small "combined heat and power" and not very big. I'm jazzed about the technology and it's potential, but it's slow coming to the consumer.
OOOOO! I would give my left one for a chance at a place like that! Only questions I have is what kind of access to the property is there, and how much money would I need to build a cabin next to yours?????
The Ohio is accessible by canoe all year. There is a mile long private gravel road from a paved road that is completely on the property to the cabin and gas wells. There is electric cables but I would want to take advantage of the natural gas and drop off the grid. No Cell service. There is a phone line but it isn't hooked up.
There's a guy that works at the State PUC that told me there's going to be a huge shortage of Natural Gas starting next year. Maybe that's just small states like Nevada, but he seemed pretty serious. It's something to look at before investing too heavily... Any way you look at it, isolated property with plenty of water should be a good investment.
Check into what kind of lease agreement the owner of the mineral rights has with the gas company. A lot of people sell the surface rights but keep, or never had, the mineral rights. The company holding the lease can come in there and drill new wells anywhere on the property they want. Also if there is a lease then the gas company will have access to the property at all times. But the benifit is that they have to maintain the road, and pay the owner a surface damage fee if they drill a well or if they build a new road.
IF it comes with the mineral rights and there is no lease to it then sounds great! IIRC the name of the company I know of is 'Guardian' who makes generators that run on natural gas. They are mostly used to install on mid to high end homes as a backup so that when grid power goes down it automaticly switches over then shuts of when the grid comes back and I know a lot of them were made to run the whole house (some includeing heating pools or hot tubs and such) while the power was out without conserving juice on any side stuff.
There are two natural gas wells on the property and they put taps on them to run the cabin;I don't think a gen-set would be much different. I need to see about the mineral rights though.
I just looked at a property in Ohio that has "free" gas, a good thing. Two points the agent brought up was that there may be limitations on the amount you can draw, and that there may also be a default end of service in the event the well no longer produces commercial quantities. I did not check the lease arrangement for that particular property, but it is something to KNOW ahead of signing on the dotted line. I can see where the limit on amount could affect gennie operation at times.
