One of the biggest enemies of a gas well is produced water out of the same formation that is producing gas. The gas “rushing” to the surface carries along with it the produced water. Shut the well in and it may water up so much it will never flow again(killing it), as well, reducing the flow down to the volume you would need for your house may let enough water into the bore hole that it would gradually fill up and kill the well.
Hard and expensive to get one flowing again. Sometimes never.
So, the moral to the story is you flow a well enough not to let it water up but not so much you gut the producing formation leading to a non producer.
“So, the moral to the story is you flow a well enough not to let it water up but not so much you gut the producing formation leading to a non producer.”
It sounds like I’d have a hard time NOT keeping a well in some sort of “commercial level” of production, leading to either:
EVERYTHING, regulation wise, that goes along with selling part of what gets produced, and the tax-regulations not likely letting me simply divert “some” of the gas produced to my home, without a transaction of some sort passing between me as individual-resident and “my company” in charge of selling what I cannot consume;
or, I’d have to produce at some sort of “commercial level” of operation and build a personal “storage farm” (LNG???) on the property of everything produced that I did not need immediately, until the well would not produce any more and/or I could not afford/didn’t want to expand the “storage farm” anymore.
Either way, the idea of buying land that contains a natural gas well that some outfit thinks is no longer commercially viable, and keeping the well running just for a minimal flow to provide energy to my own home/ranch needs on the property, may not be a practical idea after all. Darn.