New realities for U.S. natural gas

February 9, 10:10 AMDallas Oil and Gas ExaminerAlisa Martin

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The Barnett Shale natural gas play covers some
5,000 miles in north-central Texas. (U.S. Geological Survey)

Production of natural gas from Colorado - already at a three-year low - may face competition from the emerging shale-gas fields such as Texas' Barnett Shale, when demand picks up and investment dollars grow. So says a Jan. 30 story in the Denver Post.

Pete Stark of IHS Energy Consultants is quoted as saying, "We are looking at a major realignment of the natural-gas markets."

The realignment is largely because of oil and gas operators who are applying newer technologies to  unlock areas of known reserves that were previously technically challenging or uneconomical  to pursue. While the new technologies are costly,  they have the potential to tap far greater reserves per investment dollar.

The new technologies are fracture stimulation, the process of blasting water, sand or propants downhole to crack tight rock at depths of perhaps a mile or more below the Earth's surface, and horizontal drilling, which uses one well to drill down vertically, then drill one or more bores horizontally, to reach oil and gas traps. An added benefit of horizontal drilling is that more wells can be drilled from a single pad, thus reducing industry's footprint on the environment.

In the Barnett Shale, situated primarily over Fort Worth and extending 5,000 miles over north central Texas, these techniques have already yielded more than 4.8 trillion cubic feet of gas, representing about four percent of U.S. daily consumption. The Barnett Shale play is expected to produce another 30 trillion cubic feet of gas resources.

The Federal Energy Information Agency projects shale gas'  contribution to U.S. natural dry gas will grow to 18 percent in the next two decades.

Since the advent of development of the Barnett Shale about a decade ago, other U.S. shale projects have been initiated in Louisiana/Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Michigan and the Appalachia region.