Pitt. Post-Gazette Tells the Marcellus Shale Story, Highlights Huge “Economic Impact”
Monday, December 7th, 2009 | 0 Comments
Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – not a traditional fan of safe, responsible, heavily-regulated natural gas production – sheds light on the transformational natural gas production in the state’s Marcellus shale play. Here are few key excerpts from Elwin Green’s “Natural gas locked in the Marcellus Shale has companies rushing to cash in on possibilities” article:
THE FIND
In December 2007, Fort Worth, Texas, natural gas giant Range Resources released quarterly operating results documenting production from the first modern natural gas wells drilled in the Marcellus, thus giving Wall Street its first glimpse of the formation’s profit potential
The next month, an announcement by Penn State University geoscience professor Terry Engelder and City University of New York, Fredonia, geology professor Gary Lash made that potential appear much greater. In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey had estimated the shale contained some 1.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The professors estimated it contained between 168 trillion and 516 trillion cubic feet, between 80 and 250 times the government estimate.
ECONOMIC BENEFITS FOR DECADES TO COME
Talk to anyone in the industry about the Marcellus Shale and the conversation is likely to turn to its potential economic impact — not just the money that a company hopes to make, but the jobs that could be created and the tax revenues that could be generated.
According to a report released in July by Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, the Marcellus Shale helped create more than 29,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania in 2008. Of those, about 14,000 were directly related to Marcellus development. The remainder were created by what the study calls “indirect and induced impacts,” such as a restaurant near a drilling site hiring more staff because it is serving a larger lunchtime crowd.
The study predicts more than a decade of dramatic growth, with more than 48,000 new jobs this year, then another 98,000 in 2010.
By 2020, the study says, Marcellus development could add $13.5 billion to the state’s economy and create more than 176,000 new jobs in a single year.
HYDRAULIC FRACTURING, NEW TECHNOLOGIES MAKING PRODUCTION SAFE, POSSIBLE
The well made use of a technology that had long been employed in other regions — hydrofracking. As the name suggests, hydrofracking induces fractures in the shale by injecting it with water. This creates new spaces for the gas to move into, thus making more gas accessible.
The bigger breakthrough came the following year. Historically, drilling a natural gas well meant plunging a well bore straight down into the earth, with the hope of finding a pocket of gas lodged in a layer of rock. In 2005, Range drilled a well that went straight down for a distance, then turned sideways, extending its reach horizontally.
In shale formations, natural gas tends to reside in vertical fractures in the rock, so striking gas with a vertical well was literally a hit-or-miss proposition. With horizontal drilling joined to hydrofracking, Range saw a dramatic increase in production.
Neither horizontal drilling nor hydrofracking were new, either. In fact, Mr. Walker designed the first hydrofracking well in 1982. Producers used both horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas from the Barnett Shale, a formation in the Fort Worth, Texas, area.
Click HERE to view the Post-Gazette’s web video, which shows a Range Resources natural gas site and interviews the company’s Marcellus Shale division vice president, Ray Walker.
Others are speaking out, too, about the safety and soundness of responsible, 21st century shale gas development in the United States.
In today’s Glenwood Springs (CO) Post Independent, under the headline “Expert says 95 percent of oil, gas wells are fractured,” Jennifer Miskimins, associate professor of the Petroleum Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden says this about fracking:
Before hydraulic fracturing, or “frac’ing” was invented in the 1940s, Miskimins said, “Most of these reservoirs [meaning formations like those in Garfield County] we never dreamed we’d be producing from.”
“There’s nothing in frac’ing fluids that’s any more dangerous than the hydrocarbons we’re producing,” she declared, adding that the chemicals added to the fluids are in “very small volumes” compared to the gas produced.
Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) write this in a jointly-penned Politico column today entitled “The energy answer? Natural gas”:
America is experiencing a natural gas revolution. Prices are 33 percent lower than they were last year, and the industry is producing significantly more gas, thanks to technology that has uncovered enormous new supplies of natural gas.
The United States has three times the amount of natural gas it thought it had in 1966 — and 40 percent more than just a few years ago. In fact, more than 2,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is estimated to be available; at present consumption levels, that’s enough to heat all U.S. households for the next 519 years. In northwest Louisiana alone, the Haynesville Shale reserve has 251 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, almost 11 times the amount consumed by Americans last year.
And on Saturday, the Calgary Herald’s Lisa Schmidt reports this about the technological breakthroughs U.S. shale gas development is having under the headline “Shale Storm: How an energy revolution in the United States is battering natural gas prices and squeezing Albertans”:
This “shale gale,” as renowned oilpatch author Daniel Yergin has termed it, is relentlessly moving across North America, driven by technology that has unlocked major stores of the fuel.
Massive stores of shale gas, once beyond the reach of engineers, are now being successfully squeezed out from under Texas and other U.S. states.
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