DRY CREEK BASIN, Colo., Oct. 26, 10:01 a.m. – Amid a great bowl of terrain where the snow-white rocky crags and tips of the San Juans are in jagged view behind ridges that make those mountains look like the edge of the known world, and the smoother, broad-shouldered LaSalles in Utah overlooking the valley, serious work is going on, above and below ground.

The ground is dry, flat. The sage, after years of drought, is compromised, too. Well named, Dry Creek basin on this day is a duo-chrome combo of brown land and blue sky. It’s big, empty and somewhat otherworldly, tipped-over space.

The siphoning of the earth, in the form of the drilling and extraction of natural gas, then, takes the form of mining on a moonscape, except for those ridgelines covered in creosote and pinion along Andy’s Mesa.

One gets the sense of it, though, in these conditions, not the least of which is being at the base of a tall blue and white drilling rig that looks ready to blast off. Inside the fence, you get a premonition of ground zero that goes along well with the guy carrying the clipboard at the gate, who performs the security and safety check. Serious, cautious work. This is not the film Giant, nor will anything likely bust out in a gush and paint everyone with black riches. In fact, the gas coming out of the ground has little aroma at all. They add ethyl mercaptan later to give it that notorious rotten egg smell that warns when gas is leaking.

Though there’s nobody around to complain, the outdoors smoking section sign and ashtray is a football field away.

This is a moon base, from a technological point of view, with everyone involved stepping lightly along the way, around feudal spires, tanks, gauges, wires, steel drill bits the size of basketballs, thousands of feet of pipe, all pressure-tight, concrete bunkered and slickly sunk in, worked out to look like a NASA launch pad. Especially with the main structure itself looking like it would be worthy of a Mercury-era mission.

And for all of the hierarchy of it, it’s pinheads that run these machines, not the roughnecks of old.

“We have lease operators who get on their computers to check on the wells, the monitoring and production,” said Rick Costanza, the production coordinator for Encana operations in Paradox Basin, who is, in fact, one of those former roughnecks, who once mined for uranium and coal beneath the ground, then thought better of it, and is now out in the light, the big wide western sunshine, having risen to the level of a manager of a significant boom region.

The words “monitored electronically supervisory control,” and then “data acquisition” spill from his lips: the jargon of this energy-crazed age. But you can see the old style mining guy, too. Someone who nonetheless kept up on the new tools. More or less, it’s accountants who run the computers, monitoring each site for maximum production, he says.

“It’s not greasy roughnecks,” he says. “That’s not the way mining is done anymore.”

Costanza is philosophical about the whole picture. As he says, “It’s been drought out here for several years. I wish it would rain. Everything depends on water, including us.”

He’s sun-beat brown. Built like a fire-plug wrestler. Capable of lifting large rocks, cranes. Thirty one years in mining in the Paradox Basin will do that to you.

The Moab native, who lives in Norwood when it’s not winter, speaks of solar panels that power radio panels at each well, streaming the information to a control room, but he also speaks with great interest about the tough patches of barb-wired off ground being reclaimed through a program of native grass seedlings, more BLM-enforced monitoring, and so on, until the fences can be taken down and the earth, for those small quads, considered restored.

“I’ve been on the Sage-Grouse Working Group, and we (Encana) have been helping a lot with the funding,” he says. “It’s kind of interesting. I really kind of enjoy that.”

A large number of people work for Encana, which actually has around 20 full-time employees working in the Paradox Basin, but more are either contingent contractors, who are treated like company employees but are actually temporary workers, or sub-contractors who pour the concrete, bring in the dirt, haul out thousands of gallons of “produced” water, which comes up with the gas from the ground – saline as seawater – and also own all of the local big trucks to haul it all in and out.

“Most of the trucks are locals,” Costanza says. “Double T Pumping out of Redvale. Dawn Trucking out of Dove Creek. Lots of other people like Ebert’s Construction. Reams Construction out of Naturita. Williams Construction.… When you think of all the people in oil and gas here behind the scenes, you begin to see a lot more people here that are working to support the oil and gas industry.”

Having seen a lot over three decades of boom and bust in the Paradox Basin, Costanza notes the area is growing in activity to the point that improvements are needed, quickly, to handle the load. For example, in Naturita, a disposal site for produced water is maxed out. Encana is currently seeking permission from the county, he says, to build pit sites where the water can be properly dispersed using large nozzle devices, rather than mere evaporation.

This is preferable, he says, to trucking all of the water, hundreds of thousands of gallons, to the Lisbon Valley injection well in Utah.

“Naturita can’t evaporate all of the water we’d like to. I’m trying to get permitted for an evaporation system. It would be easier. Gets the trucks off the road. The nozzle system turns the water into mist, so it can evaporate a lot faster.”

Indeed, even the condensate of what’s essentially raw gasoline, another residue that comes from the drilling, is of commercial use. The natural gas, after processing on site, is ready for use and transport on the Trans-Colorado Pipeline. But the disposal of the groundwater that comes from 7,000 to 8,000 feet beneath the surface, the produced water, is trash. That is, it needs to be sent to an injection well hours away by truckload or evaporated in pits with high-tech spray devices releasing the vapor into the air.

The entrance gate sign for Nabors drilling, which owns the biggest rig on the mesa, among the many dire things it warns about, includes a caution about snakes. A worker tells Costanza, “We’re just drilling a head, 800 feet from TD.” Rather than touchdown, Costanza says, it means total depth, which could be anywhere from 7,000 to 9,000 feet.

“Seven thousand to 9,000 feet deep, that’s where the product water comes from,” he says. They stimulate the lowest areas through inducing tiny fractures in the rock with special explosives and other high-pressure games known as frac’ing, a process patented by Halliburton. All the while, the point here is to get 8,000 feet of steel pipe to reach the “sweet spot,” a point of high production that can last, with tweaks every now and then on the circuit board, for years and years.

Though it’s quaking the earth to crack open the goods first, you wouldn’t notice much above ground.

“They squeeze it out of the rock through high pressure,” he said. “When they are frac’ing, the only thing you notice is all of the trucks in the location.”

And, of course, most of this is going on far from the view of towns already considered to be remote.

“It’s a long way to anywhere out here,” he says. “Even if you live in Naturita, the closest stop light is 70 miles away.”