GarysWorld USA

A funny thing is happening on the way to the clean energy future–reality is setting in. There is ‘incontrovertible evidence’ about the economic growth and job creating effects of America’s unconventional oil and gas production boom – more than 600,000 jobs directly attributable to shale gas development. Even President Obama is praising the job creating benefits of ‘America’s resource boom’. America is getting its energy mojo back and that is good news but not the entire story.

How Much Shale Gas is there in the United States? In July 2011 US EIA released a [Review of Emerging Resources: US Shale Gas and Shale Oil Plays produced by INTEK. This is an updated assessment of onshore lower 48 states technically recoverable shale gas and shale oil resources. The assessment found the lower 48 states have a total 750 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas resources with the largest portions in the Northeast (63%), Gulf Coast (13%), and Southwest regions (10%) respectively. The largest shale gas plays are the Marcellus (410.3 trillion cubic feet, 55 percent of the total), Haynesville (74.7 trillion cubic feet, 10 percent of the total), and Barnett (43.4 trillion cubic feet, 6 percent of the total).The INTEK assessment was incorporated into the Onshore Lower 48 Oil and Gas Supply Submodule (OLOGSS) within the Oil and Gas Supply Module (OGSM) of NEMS to project oil and natural gas production for the Annual Energy Outlook 2011 (AEO2011) to provide a starting point for future work.

Total US recoverable natural gas resources (includes conventional, unconventional in lower 48, Alaska and offshore) totals 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet according to the Institute for Energy Research:

• Enough natural gas to meet US electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand for generation levels
• Enough natural gas to fuel homes heated by natural gas in the United States for 857 years
• More natural gas than Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan combined.

The US has Three Times the Proven Reserves of Saudi Arabia in Shale Oil. Global oil shale resources exceed 10 trillion barrels. More than 1.8 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in shale in Federal lands in the western United States in the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, of which 800 billion is considered recoverable–three times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. The INTEK assessment for EIA found 23.9 billion barrels of technically recoverable shale oil resources in the onshore Lower 48 States. The Southern California Monterey/Santos play is the largest shale oil formation estimated to hold 15.4 billion barrels or 64 percent of the total shale oil resources followed by Bakken and Eagle Ford with approximately 3.6 billion barrels and 3.4 billion barrels of oil, respectively…

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