Updates
Later, 9:34 p.m. CT: see comments. A reader mentioned that lifting costs in the desert were a whole lot less than those in the Bakken. This is as good a time as any to re-post "break-even" costs in the Bakken:
$8 / bbl in Mountrail County. $12 statewide.
Original Post
From a reader:
I didn't see much news on this, but the USGS has new a new application for US natural gas assessments.In round numbers, then, about 100 TCF for both the Marcellus and the Utica; the estimates will increase over time.
The USGS shows a marginal increase in the Marcellus from 84 to 97 TCF.
In addition, there's an (initial?) assessment of the Utica at 117 TCF.
This is showing the normal pattern of the USGS increases over time that we've seen in other plays (Bakken, Permian, etc.)
Also, while big, the USGS numbers are still quite lower than the Potential Gas Committee (PGC) estimates (which also tend to get bigger over time): http://potentialgas.org/press-release.
To put these numbers in perspective, see this post.
The "117 TCF" is well under what others have estimated:
- Utica, newly revised figures: 782 trillion cubic feet
According to the new study’s estimates, the total Utica Shale play could hold technically recoverable volumes of 782 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and nearly 2 billion barrels of oil.
The estimates from a research partnership organized by West Virginia University represent the average of a wider range of possibly recoverable amounts of oil and gas in the Utica, which stretches beneath parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and other states and includes neighboring oil- and gas-bearing geologic layers.
A 2012 U.S. Geological Survey assessment of the Utica Shale and underlying Point Pleasant formation pegged the technically recoverable undiscovered resources at 38 trillion cubic feet of gas, 940 million barrels of oil and 208 million barrels of natural gas liquids such as ethane, butane and propane.Regardless of the various estimates, the bottom line: the US remains "king of natural gas." From the USGS press release, September 11, 2019:
The Potential Gas Committee (PGC) today released the results of its latest biennial assessment of the nation’s natural gas resources, which indicates that the United States possesses a total mean technically recoverable resource base of 3,374 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) as of year-end 2018.
This is the highest resource evaluation in the Committee’s 54-year history, exceeding the previous high assessment (from year-end 2016) by 557 Tcf (increase of about 20%).
This is also the largest two-year increase in absolute resources between evaluations in the PGC history.
The increase resulted from reassessments of shale gas resources in the Atlantic and Mid-Continent areas and conventional and tight gas in the Mid-Continent and Rocky Mountain areas.
