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Page added on September 2, 2011
How Small Is That Revised Marcellus Estimate?
I see in The Hill that some critics of shale gas drilling are pointing to a revised estimate of the shale gas resources in the Marcellus formation as evidence that there’s not enough gas to justify any risk from hydraulic fracturing. Earlier this week the US Geological Survey updated its previous estimate to 84 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, a figure substantially less than the estimate of 410 TCF from the Department of Energy. Now, I’d have thought that even without doing the math on this, 84 TCF would still sound like a heck of a lot of gas, even if trillions have become the new billions in another context.
Perhaps cubic feet of gas don’t convey quite the same degree of familiarity as barrels of oil, which most people can visualize, so it might be useful to think of this gas in its oil-equivalent terms. Using standard conversion factors, that 84 TCF in the Marcellus equates to roughly 14.5 billion barrels of oil. For comparison, that’s half again as big as the original estimate of 9.6 billion barrels for the Prudhoe Bay field on the Alaskan North Slope. (FYI, Prudhoe Bay had produced a cumulative 11.5 billion barrels as of the end of 2007 and was still estimated to have a few billion barrels to go.) In that light, does anyone still want to argue that the Marcellus resource is inconsequential?
5 Comments on "How Small Is That Revised Marcellus Estimate?"
BS on Fri, 2nd Sep 2011 5:27 pm
Not inconsequential, but 1/5 as consequential as last week.
Bob Owens on Fri, 2nd Sep 2011 6:16 pm
For the USGS to make an initial estimate and then reduce it by 80% makes anything they say, now or in the future, suspect. Let’s stop deluding ourselves and start moving towards a world without gas or oil. We will end up there a lot sooner than we would like to, anyway. In the future we will need all the underground water we can get; climate change will make non-irrigated crops very speculative. No point in poisoning it with all this drilling.
sunweb on Fri, 2nd Sep 2011 6:51 pm
Move your family next to one of these wells and drill your water well there. And you have no financial investment in this endeavor.
we might now be choosing to further pollute our water underground for greed and energy by fracking. FRACKING. It sounds almost obscene, in practice it is.
From:
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/09/in-bed-with-energy.html
Speaking about the future, without a doubt we need our snowmobiles. We need our wave runners, our four wheelers, and our big ass trucks for groceries. We need lights on everywhere to tell us what to buy all night long, we need wall size television sets, our golf carts for exercise and our electric can openers. We need our oil and natural gas by golly. We don’t need no frackin’ water.
From the Curmudgeon Vignettes, read more at:
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/07/curmudgeon-vignettes.html
James A. Hellams on Fri, 2nd Sep 2011 9:44 pm
Dear Sirs:
The Marcellus field is inconsequential.
At 84 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, this equals 14.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent. However, the US consumption of oil is 8 billion barrels of oil annually. The present worldwide oil consumption demand is approaching 32 billion barrels of oil annually.
Based on these figures, are the following results. The US consumption of oil would completely consume the Marcellus field in 1.8 years! The worldwide oil consumption would wipe out the Marcellus field in 0.45 years!
The Marcellus field would be consumed in short order.
BillT on Sat, 3rd Sep 2011 3:38 am
Not worth destroying the ecology for…