First Assessment of Shale Gas Resources in the Utica Shale: 38 Trillion Cubic Feet

The Utica Shale contains about 38 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas (at the mean estimate) according to the first assessment of this continuous (unconventional) natural gas accumulation by the U. S. Geological Survey.  The Utica Shale has a mean of 940 million barrels of unconventional oil resources and a mean of 208 million barrels of unconventional natural gas liquids.

The Utica Shale lies beneath the Marcellus Shale, and both are part of the Appalachian Basin, which is the longest-producing petroleum province in the United States. The Marcellus Shale, at 84 TCF of natural gas, is the largest unconventional gas basin USGS has assessed.  This is followed closely by the Greater Green River Basin in southwestern Wyoming, which has 84 TCF of undiscovered natural gas, of which 82 TCF is continuous (tight gas). 

"Understanding our domestic oil and gas resource potential is important, which is why we assess emerging plays like the Utica, as well as areas that have been in production for some time" said Brenda Pierce, USGS Energy Resources Program Coordinator.  "Publicly available information about undiscovered oil and gas resources can aid policy makers and resource managers, and inform the debate about resource development."

The Utica Shale assessment covered areas in Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

Some shale rock formations, like the Utica and Marcellus, can be source rocks – those formations from which hydrocarbons, such as oil and gas, originate. Conventional oil and gas resources gradually migrate away from the source rock into other formations and traps, whereas continuous resources, such as shale oil and shale gas, remain trapped within the original source rock.

These new estimates are for technically recoverable oil and gas resources, which are those quantities of oil and gas producible using currently available technology and industry practices, regardless of economic or accessibility considerations.

This USGS assessment is an estimate of continuous oil, gas, and natural gas liquid accumulations in the Upper Ordovician Utica Shale of the Appalachian Basin. The estimate of undiscovered oil ranges from 590 million barrels to 1.39 billion barrels (95 percent to 5 percent probability, respectively), natural gas ranges from 21 to 61 TCF (95 percent to 5 percent probability, respectively), and the estimate of natural gas liquids ranges from 4 to 16 million barrels (95 percent to 5 percent probability, respectively).

USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources of onshore lands and offshore state waters. The USGS Utica Shale assessment was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol.

The new assessment of the Utica Shale may be found online. To find out more about USGS energy assessments and other energy research, please visit the USGS Energy Resources Program website, sign up for ourNewsletter, and follow us on Twitter.

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Quebec: Shale Gas Chop

Environmental activists were celebrating Thursday as Quebec’s new government gave an unambiguous thumbs-down to the shale gas industry in the morning and confirmed its intention to quickly shut down the Gentilly-2 nuclear plant in the afternoon.

Add to this recent assurances by the new government that asbestos mining will soon be prohibited in the province, and that three former environmental activists have been named to the cabinet, and it’s no surprise that some ecologically minded Quebecers are figuratively, if not literally, popping corks.

“It’s a beautiful day,” said André Bélisle, president of the Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique (AQLPA), which has been fighting the shale gas, nuclear and asbestos industries for years.

“A lot of people say they are disillusioned with politicians because they don’t do what they say they will do, but here we are seeing the PQ doing exactly that; following through on all of these commitments they made during the campaign,” said Steven Guilbeault of Équiterre.

On her way into her first cabinet meeting Thursday morning, Natural Resources Minister Martine Ouellet told reporters she does not believe natural gas can ever be safely extracted from shale rock. She vowed to impose a complete moratorium on the industry until a new and more complete environmental assessment by the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) is completed.

The Liberal government already imposed a de facto moratorium on shale gas exploration and exploitation last March for the two and a half years it would take to do a Strategic Environmental Assessment on the issue.

That assessment was to be completed by November 2013. Now it looks like a full BAPE review will be ordered, one that will include a look at alternatives to shale gas exploitation.
The new minister’s position is “frustrating” to Michael Binnion, president of Questerre, a company that has invested about $200 million with its partner Talisman in shale gas exploration projects in Quebec with “no return to date.”

“We’ve already had a BAPE review, not a full one, but we worked and cooperated with that process. The BAPE recommended a Strategic Environmental Assessment and we are co-operating with that, and now this would be our third environmental review of natural gas development in Quebec so it seems likely the decision would be kicked down the road even further.”

He said slowing down development of shale gas in Quebec is only benefiting producers in Western Canada and the U.S., from which Quebec is purchasing natural gas.

But Ouellet seems to be listening to the hundreds of mostly rural Quebecers who showed up at a series of information sessions last December and said they are concerned about the threat shale gas drilling poses to their drinking water, air quality and quality of life.

Ouellet, as the PQ’s spokesperson on shale gas before the election, has visited communities in Pennsylvania where shale gas drilling has caused well-publicized problems.

As a former president of the water protection group Eau Secours!, Ouellet is considered a very green choice for Natural Resources Minister, although she is also an engineer who worked for Hydro-Québec before entering politics.

But the biggest coup for the environmental movement is Quebec’s new environment minister, Daniel Breton, founder and until recently president of Groupe Maître chez nous 21e siècle, a group that specializes in energy and transportation issues.

Breton is also a former director of the AQLPA, and a co-founder of Quebec’s Green Party.
And Breton’s deputy in the environment department will be Scott McKay, a former Montreal city councillor who lead Quebec’s Green Party from 2006 to 2008 and has also been active with the AQLPA.

Premier Pauline Marois announced Thursday afternoon her government will be closing the Gentilly-2 nuclear plant in Bécancour, as soon as Hydro-Québec and the Natural Resources Department can agree on a process to decommission the plant “in an orderly fashion.” The Liberals had planned to spend about $2 billion to refurbish the plant.

Équiterre’s Guilbeault praised these moves, and noted that Marois visited his organization’s Montreal headquarters during the campaign and promised to reduce Quebec’s oil dependence by 30 per cent between now and 2020. She said they would reduce funding to new highway projects and invest the money saved in electrifying public transit systems and promoting use of electric vehicles, he said.

He only hopes the PQ will be able to achieve some of its key environmental commitments, despite its minority status. “Minority governments tend to be short-lived so we are hoping they can achieve as much as possible,” he said.


BY MICHELLE LALONDE@montrealgazette.com


This video explains the geological and technical aspects of the proposed exploitation of the Utica shale gas in the densely populated area between Montreal and Quebec. The technical documents discusses the very serious technical limitations and flaws of the fracking method. It shows why only a mere 20% of the gas can be extracted by this technique, and the serious consequences that this will imply, with the remaining 80% of methane that will slowly but continuously for years and centuries, flow from the fractured shale.

The Government Role in the Shale Gas Revolution

A recent blog post by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Mark Perry insists on solely crediting “market forces” for the shale gas revolution. Perry continues to push a false narrative that the market alone developed and deployed the technologies used today to extract shale natural gas, which has resulted in dirt-cheap prices and natural gas industry growth – natural gas is now tied with coal as America’s top source of electricity. It follows a similar piece earlier this year by AEI’s Steven Hayward that characterized the shale gas revolution as occurring “away from the greedy grasp of Washington,” thus completely overlooking any government role whatsoever. “If the political class had known this was going on,” he declares, “surely Washington would have done something to slow it up, tax it more, or stop it altogether.” In reality, the government deserves ample credit for not only developing the next generation natural gas technologies used today but also for partnering with industry to accelerate deployment of those technologies to market.

Oakland-based think-tank the Breakthrough Institute conducted an investigation that sheds light on the extent to which the government helped foster technology innovation in the natural gas sector (and an ITIF blog post summarizes here):

From the 1970’s through the 1990’s, the federal government partnered with the gas industry to develop horizontal drilling installations, hydraulic fracturing, and the mapping technologies that make shale gas even possible. These technologies got their start in at the Morgantown Energy Research Center, which provided investments for RD&D into new natural gas drilling technologies.  From that center and subsequent government funded demonstration projects came directional drilling.  Ultimately, a private company – Mitchell Energy – commercialized the technology.  But government energy innovation policy didn’t stop there. Mitchell Energy and the Department of Energy (DOE) continued partnering, as DOE (through the Federal Labs and the Gas Research Institute) provided vital mapping R&D to understand and exploit shale gas formations. Targeted ‘non-conventional’ gas tax credits sustained development of these technologies when no market existed and a gas rate-payer surcharge was used to fund early research.

In other words, the shale natural gas revolution is an inconvenient reality for those that want to push the Solyndra-narrative that government can do no right in addressing U.S. energy challenges. In fact, as the last century of breakthrough technology development has shown (including the shale natural gas revolution) government can and has done right. So instead of pushing a false narrative, the energy policy debate would be much better served by teasing out the research, development, deployment, and public-private partnership models that worked (like the Breakthrough Institute did in their study) and didn’t work to make better government investments in breakthrough technologies and energy policies.

By Clifton Yin@theenergycollective.com