The difficulty and uncertainty in predicting natural gas resources was underscored last week when the Energy Information Administration released a report containing sharply lower estimates.

The agency estimated that there are 482 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in the United States, down from the 2011 estimate of 827 trillion cubic feet — a drop of more than 40 percent. The report also said the Marcellus region, a rock formation under parts of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, contained 141 trillion cubic feet of gas. That represents a 66 percent drop from the 410 trillion cubic feet estimate offered in the agency’s last report.  MORE

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has completed an initial assessment that suggests shale gas resources, which have recently provided a major boost to U.S. natural gas production, are also available in other world regions.

EIA sponsored Advanced Resources International Inc., to assess 48 gas shale basins in 32 countries, containing almost 70 shale gas formations. This effort has culminated in the report: World Shale Gas Resources: An Initial Assessment of 14 Regions Outside the United States.

The study reported initial assessments of 5,760 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of technically recoverable shale gas resources in 32 foreign countries. Adding the estimated U.S. shale gas technically recoverable resources (862 Tcf) to the assessments in the study gives a total of 6,622 Tcf.

For comparison, most current estimates of world technically recoverable natural gas resources include few if any of the resources assessed in this study and total about 16,000 Tcf.

“Adding identified shale gas resources to current estimates of other gas resources increases total world technically recoverable resources by over 40 percent, to more than 22,000 trillion cubic feet,” said EIA Administrator Richard Newell.

Estimates of shale gas resources in other parts of the world are highly uncertain. The practicality of using such resources has only recently become apparent, and many countries are just now beginning to understand how to conduct assessments of how much shale gas they may have. Nonetheless, the aggregate estimate is probably quite conservative, since the study excluded several major types of potential shale gas resources:

• Nations outside the 32 countries studied. These include Russia and the Middle East, which have very large resources of conventional gas.
• Some shale basins in the countries studied. In many cases, no estimates are possible yet for these basins.
• Offshore resources.

Of the countries covered in the EIA-sponsored study, two groups may find shale gas development most attractive. The first is those countries that currently depend heavily on natural gas imports but that also have significant shale gas resources. These include France, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, South Africa, Morocco, and Chile.

The second group is those countries that already produce substantial amounts of natural gas and also have large shale resources. In addition to the United States, this group includes Canada, Mexico, China, Australia, Libya, Algeria, Argentina, and Brazil.

Read the EIA Report HERE

The numbers for foreign oil imports in June 2009:

- The USA imported $24.7 billions dollars, (354 million barrels of oil). This is a 13% increase from 21.6 billion spent in May 2009

- 64% of all Oil we used was imported

- The USA exported nearly $25 billion for imported oil, our worst month thus far in 2009

In the first six months of this year, the United States has imported 2.23 billion barrels of oil.

National security and domestic control and cost have all been a part of the conversation dating back to when Carter was President.
President Carter committed that we would never again import as much oil as we did in 1979.

A shift in perspective for the USA is significant. We need to use secure, clean and domestic fuel such as natural gas. Using secure,
affordable domestic fuel resources are something to build upon. It remains to be seen if Obama can do what Carter promised – I hope he can.

Post by: C. Keddy