Three months ago, Bill Dirks, president of Tecton Energy, told the people of Santa Fe his company wanted to drill for oil — light, sweet crude — in the Galisteo Basin.

But the buzz among anti-drilling activists has been that Tecton's oil talk is a red herring to divert attention away from the fact that the company is really looking for natural gas in the Galisteo Basin.

Some facts do indicate a gas play.

For example: Tecton announced in 2006 that Quantum Energy Partners had made a $30 million equity commitment to Tecton to facilitate Tecton's "exploration and exploitation ... of unconventional resource gas plays."

In October, Dirks spoke at an Association of American Petroleum Geologists conference about Tecton's efforts to extend the limits of a "large basin-centered gas deposit" northward from Albuquerque into Santa Fe.

Tecton also has three gas wells in the Albuquerque area.

Dirks declined to comment for this story.

But The New Mexican asked several other experts: Could Tecton be looking for gas instead of oil? And does it matter?

"Probably as far as how they are going to go about drilling and everything, it doesn't matter a whole lot," said Ron Broadhead, principal petroleum geologist at New Mexico Tech. "The equipment is the same, and the wells are pretty much the same construction."

Broadhead said the extraction of coal-bed methane uses significantly more water than production of either oil or traditional natural gas, but that the mineral reserves in the Galisteo area probably are not coal-bed methane. "There just isn't enough coal out there," Broadhead said.

Broadhead said from his point of view, traditional natural gas is the more "passive" resource to develop. "In my own opinion, gas is pretty harmless," Broadhead said. "It comes out of a well, comes into a pipeline and goes off to stores, your home or wherever it ends up getting burned."

Broadhead said the lecture Dirks gave on the gas basin in the Albuquerque area doesn't necessarily have any bearing on what the company expects to find near Santa Fe because the geology of the two regions isn't the same.

"The Albuquerque basin is different," Broadhead said. "It's a lot deeper. The ... temperatures have been hotter, so ... much of any oil has likely been converted by natural process to gas. In Galisteo, you are much shallower. It's a different ballgame."

"Last I heard (in) Santa Fe, they'd found oil there." said Renee Kosnik, research director for the Oil and Gas Accountability Project. "They may be trying to go for both, but ... our intel is that they are going for oil."

Two of the main differences in the way oil and gas are developed are the spacing of the wells and the way the resource is transported.

According to Oil Conservation Division rules, gas wells are allowed to be spaced on the basis of one well per 160 acres. Oil wells can be spaced much more densely, with one to four wells allowed every 40 acres. More wells can mean more roads, more noise, more pollution.

But the Oil Conservation Division can grant exceptions to either of these spacing rules, according to Director Mark Fesmire.

Fesmire said in some cases, the spacing of oil or gas wells can be reduced to as little as one well every 10 acres, "if that's what it takes to efficiently produce the reservoir."

Fesmire said directional drilling — in which multiple wells are drilled from a single drilling island, cutting down on the number of roads required — is usually more achievable with gas wells. "Gas production is usually more efficient because it requires less wells," Fesmire said. "But making absolute statements in this business is very difficult," he added. "It just depends on the conditions in the field."

The other main difference between oil and gas production can be summed up in one word: pipelines.

For the most part, gas requires pipelines; oil may not.

Here too, there are no hard and fast rules.

Fesmire said oil can be transported by truck in the early phases of production, but most oil in New Mexico is piped to refineries.

If Tecton found a lot of gas in the Galisteo Basin, a pipeline would be the inevitable result. If the company found a lot of oil, it could initially mean a lot of truck traffic, but ultimately a pipeline as well.

Gas and oil are often found together, and wells aren't officially classified until far into the production cycle, according to Fesmire.

"They tell us what they think it's gonna be in the application," he said. "Then they tell us what it's actually producing. Oil wells can grade into gas wells, and gas wells can grade into oil wells."

Before more modern rules were adopted, he said, oil drillers who encountered incremental amounts of gas could "vent" it into the atmosphere. "That's against the law in New Mexico now," Fesmire said. "Because gas has value. Now it's all saved and sold."

Fesmire said the oil produced by gas wells is of such high quality it hardly has to be refined at all.

Fesmire said drillers do need to get easements to run pipelines across private property. But if landowners are uncooperative, petroleum producers often can obtain the right to bury pipeline across the property through eminent domain, something Fesmire said is common.

Bill Brown, a geologist and hydrologist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for 36 years before retiring to Taos in 2004, said the impact of either kind of hydrocarbon extraction is "huge and permanent."

Brown, who works for The Climate Project and played a large part in getting restrictions placed on gas development in the Valle Vidal, said extraction-related impacts are just a small part of a larger issue. Society needs to eliminate its use of hydrocarbons, he said.

"Any fossil fuels that we burn contribute to the phenomenon of global warming and climate change," he said. "That's why we have to get away from them as much as we can. That's the big story of the moment. That transcends everything."

Contact Phaedra Haywood at 986-3068 or phaywood@sfnewmexican.com.