Watershed at a Glance. The Cannon River watershed is located south of the Twin Cities and encompasses areas of Dakota, Goodhue, Le Sueur, Steele, Rice and Waseca counties. The watershed drains approximately 1,460 square miles through two main channels, the Cannon and Straight Rivers, to the Mississippi at Red Wing.
While some large industrial, commercial, and electric generation customers receive natural gas directly from high capacity interstate and intrastate pipelines (usually contracted through natural gas marketing companies), most other users receive natural gas from their local gas utility, also called a local distribution company (LDC).
In some cases, the classification of oil- or gas-targeted rigs, which is the focus of traditional rig-count methods, has changed from day to day. A more meaningful way to classify wells is to allocate the amount of oil and natural gas that can be expected to flow from each new well in a given play. This approach uses oil and natural gas production at the well before any flaring, refining, or gas processing. As such, all hydrocarbon production in the liquid state at the wellhead is treated as oil, and all unprocessed gas production (known as gross production) is treated as natural gas.