Fracking sadface: U.S. has one-fifth the shale gas once projected

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"Oops," says the United States Geological Survey, "We used to think the shale on the East coast of the U.S., which gas companies are currently fracking into submission, had a metric buttload of natural gas. Turns out it only 0.2 metric buttloads." (I'm paraphrasing.)

Yesterday, the USGS's estimate of U.S. reserves of gas trapped in the Marcellus shale went from 410 trillion "technically recoverable" cubic feet of gas to 84 trillion in the span of a single report.

Because this week is Ragnarok and, basically, ghouls are in charge, the natural gas industry actually cheered this report, noting that it still represented significantly more reserves than the USGS estimated were in the shale in 2002. Back then, before fracking was widespread, it was estimated there were only 2 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable gas in the Marcellus.

Also important: none of these estimates reflect how much of this gas can profitably be extracted from the ground. Because that mostly depends on how desperate we become and how hard we decide to ignore the down sides of fracking.

straight to the source

• Geologists Sharply Cut Estimate of Shale Gas, New York Times

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What the frack?

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Drilling costs and well productivity, can have a greater effect on projected natural gas production and prices than variations in estimated amounts of technically recoverable resources

Penn State University geologist Terry Engelder said the EIA was "guilty of a lack of clarity" in spelling out how its report differed from the USGS study. Engelder, whose 2008 estimate for Marcellus potential helped to set off the drilling boom, said the USGS report focused on undiscovered gas resources while EIA measured active and undeveloped supplies.

"These are two different agencies doing two different things," Engelder said.

The USGS figures represent an average of several possibilities about the gas reserves, located thousands of feet beneath the surface and coaxed out of the ground through methods such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Water mixed with chemicals is injected into the ground to break up the shale and allow natural gas to escape.

The new survey suggested that Marcellus gas reserves range from 43 trillion cubic feet to 144 trillion cubic feet. That's a 40-fold increase from a 2002 report that estimated 2 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in the region