Category: Shale Gas

The U.S. may have even more—and much cheaper to get—supplies of natural gas than anyone imagined. The trick is applying supersize versions of the horizontal-drilling and fracking techniques that worked successfully elsewhere to an area that hasn’t seen this approach yet. The gains come from extending the lateral portions of wells by thousands of feet and pumping them full of enormous volumes of sand, chemicals and water to flush out more hydrocarbons. So far, the impressive results have been confined to a small area in a single Louisiana parish near the Texas border. But if the approach works across the giant Haynesville Shale, which spans 120 miles across both states, the era of low American gas prices could extend for decades into the future, experts say. “There’s a large likelihood that the United States will be enjoying very low gas prices for a very long time, maybe 20 years,” […]

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Federal U.S. report finds only one of seven shale natural gas basins are expected to post gains in overall short-term production. Photo by photostock77/Shutterstock WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 (UPI) — A drilling productivity report from the United States finds the Utica shale basin in Ohio is the only one of seven reviewed that’s expecting more production. The U.S. Energy Information Administration finds production from seven shale basins in the United States reached 45.6 billion cubic feet per day in May for an all-time high. That’s expected to drop 1.5 percent by September. The report finds net natural gas production from new wells drilled into U.S. shale reserves is not enough to counter the expected decline from legacy wells. EIA attributed that phenomenon to the decline in the number of drilling rigs deployed across the country. "Given the substantial drop in rig counts since the fourth quarter of 2014 in each […]

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Canadian energy company Encana sells shale acreage in Louisiana in an effort to ease debt burden. Photo by Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock CALGARY, Alberta, Aug. 25 (UPI) — In an effort to cut debt, Canadian energy company Encana Corp. said Tuesday it was selling its shale natural gas assets in Louisiana for $850 million. Encana said it was unloading its assets in the Haynesville shale basin to GEP Haynesville, LLC, a joint venture formed by fund manager GSO Capital Partners and GeoSouthern Haynesville. The Canadian company said it would use the cash from the sale, as well as savings from the footprint reduction, to cut debt. "By further focusing our portfolio, we are making Encana more efficient as we proceed through the second half of 2015 and into 2016," Encana President and Chief Executive Officer Doug Suttles said in a statement. "This transaction delivers significant proceeds that we’ll use to strengthen […]

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WAYNESBURG, Pa.—As fracking took off here over the past eight years, so did Gary Bowers’s business supplying everything from Gatorade to replacement valves to crews drilling into natural-gas reserves a mile underground. This year, however, the good times at his firm, Producers Supply Co., came to a screeching halt. Since January, the company’s monthly sales have declined by more than half, as the number of drilling rigs operating in the Marcellus Shale has plummeted to 70 from 131 at the end of last year. “This thing is spiraling down, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last,” said Mr. Bowers, who expects the rig count to keep falling. “It’s new territory for Appalachia.” The economic pain from lower oil and gas prices is spreading to small towns and businesses across Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio and West Virginia that had been riding a wave of prosperity from […]

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Eight years ago, a group of companies led by Kinder Morgan Energy Partners began building a $6.8 billion pipeline to carry natural gas from America’s Rocky Mountains to fuel-hungry markets in the East. Then came the shale gas revolution. The eastern U.S. is now home to the country’s most productive formation, the Marcellus, and the 1,698-mile Rockies Express is carrying lower-cost gas in the opposite direction. On Aug. 1, the pipeline was partially reversed, shrinking the market for Colorado and Wyoming drillers who’ve seen their share prices fall as much as 93 percent from 2008 highs. The burgeoning supply from Pennsylvania and West Virginia has transformed the U.S. gas market, redirecting pipeline flows and sending prices plummeting. Output from the Niobrara shale formation in Colorado and Wyoming has dropped 12 percent from an all-time high in 2012 as production from the region competes with the Marcellus, where output is […]

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An ocean of ink has already been spilled on pros and cons of using Hubbert curves to model production from a large collection of wells in one or many reservoirs. In 2010, I published together with my last graduate student in Berkeley, Dr. Greg Croft, a highly cited paper on this subject. I have also commented multiple times in this blog on the different aspects of the Hubbert curve analysis, its limitations, and predictive power. Since I cannot out-talk or out-convince the numerous critics of this type of analysis, let me give you a simple example of its robustness. This particular story is as follows. At the end of the year 2010, Greg Fenves, at that time Dean of UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering in Austin, asked me to make a presentation to the School’s Engineering Advisory Board (EAB). Using the results of our recent paper with Greg Croft, […]

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Natural gas-fired combined-cycle units, which have emerged as perhaps the most important elements of utility and independent power generation fleets, have been costing less than was initially expected to build, and per-kW costs of less than $1,000/kW of installed capacity have become common. Duke Energy Progress said Tuesday that the final cost of its 625-MW Sutton combined-cycle project near Wilmington, North Carolina, was $551 million, or about $882/kW of installed capacity, about 18% less than the company’s original $671 million estimate, or a per-kW cost of about $1,073. Duke Energy spokeswoman Lisa Parrish said DEP and its sister utilities have built six gas-fired units over the last five years. "All have come in under budget," she said. "As we begin to build two new natural [gas-fired] facilities in the Carolinas, we will take advantage of efficiencies and best practices we’ve learned." Parrish said the project costs include associated transmission […]

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For the past several weeks, the drilling industry — hammered by bad financial results — has begun promoting its next big thing: the Utica shale, generating the sort of headlines you might have seen five years ago, when the shale drilling rush was gaining speed. “ Utica Shale Holds 20 Times More Gas Than Previous Estimates ”, read one headline. “ Utica Bigger Than Marcellus ”, proclaimed another. The reason for the excitement was a study, published by West Virginia University, that concluded the Utica contains more shale gas than many estimates for the Marcellus shale, a staggering 782 trillion cubic feet. “This is a landmark study that demonstrates the vast potential of the Utica as a resource to complement – and go beyond – what the Marcellus has already proven to be,” Brian Anderson, director of West Virginia University’s Energy Institute, told the Associated Press. But those considering […]

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graph of natural gas production in selected regions, as explained in the article text The productivity of natural gas wells in the Marcellus Shale and the neighboring Utica Shale is steadily increasing because of ongoing improvements in precision and efficiency of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing occurring in those regions. Since January 2012, natural gas production in the Marcellus and Utica regions has accounted for 85% of the increase in natural gas production reported in EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) and has driven recent growth in total U.S. natural gas production. The DPR provides a month-ahead projection of both oil and natural gas production for the seven most significant shale formations in the United States. Although the DPR regions are grouped according to the name of the predominant shale formation, the report analyzes all drilling and production within each geographic area. In practice, this means natural gas production activity […]

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