USGS: Massive Upgrading Of Marcellus Shale Gas Reserves

Marcellus via GCC
It is to be expected that as better technology and better data about oil & gas reservoir fields comes available, that large new fields will be found, and existing fields will prove to have greater capacity than at first conservatively believed. That is the case, according to the USGS, with the Marcellus Shale formation pictured above.

The Marcellus Shale contains about 84.198 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas and 3.379 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas liquids, according to a new geology-based assessment by the US Geological Survey (USGS). Technically recoverable oil and gas resources are those quantities of oil and gas producible using currently available technology and industry practices, regardless of economic or accessibility considerations.

These gas estimates are significantly higher than the last USGS assessment of the Marcellus Shale in the Appalachian Basin in 2002, which estimated a mean of about 2 trillion cubic feet of gas (TCF) and 0.01 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.

The increase in undiscovered, technically recoverable resource is due to new geologic information and engineering data, as technological developments in producing unconventional resources (e.g., the fracking boom) have been significant in the last decade, USGS says. _Marcellus Shale Gas Upgrade

Life has been present on planet Earth for almost 4 billion years. Given the plots of historical rises in O2 and drops in CO2, it should be clear that most of the bio-petroleum formation occurred long before the eras of the geologic basins which are being tapped for oil & gas currently. This means that the greatest amount of the world's hydrocarbon resource, by a wide margin, remains undiscovered.

Here's to improved geologic data.