Regarding Canadian resources, AJM Petroleum Consultants from Calgary has good online pdf's (www.ajma.net then click on "about ajm", then "news and events", then "past presentations"). Also try www.rdfuture.com and click on "natural gas" and scroll down to the 5th graph. In general, AJM is predicting very expensive times ahead for Canadians and their cold climate. And the Canadian Society for Unconventional Gas indicates (if memory serves) that coal bed methane could only make up about 10% of the shortfall by 2020. I got to thinking a lot about this in February when windchill temperatures got down to minus 50 celsius just north of Calgary.

Gail

I can't find the link to the site I found this info on. As I remember the problem had something to do with the holes bieng smaller than in US basins, and more difficult to fracture. They expected progress to be slow but the potential resource is immense.

Find some oil? Sure, all the time. Enough oil? That's a different question, as I'm sure you know.

Hi Diss,

Undrilled or sparsely-drilled basins are obviously more difficult, and this should be reflected in the P10-P90 range - which may include zero as a lower limit, meaning non-zero probability that the basin is barren for any of a dozen reasons. In the case of Greenland you would be able to work from analogy with the Jurassic and Triassic of the North Sea. It was the same basin before the Atlantic opened up, though the subsequent geological history would be very different - thermal history affecting hydrocarbon generation, and tectonic history affecting trap creation and destruction. You might have some approximate mapping from coastal outcrops and regional seismic.

It isn't a cookie cutter - every basin is unique, and the available data vary widely in type, quantity and quality. So does the amount of time and detail that you can put into the exercise. As you say, the popular press rarely bothers to mention this important fact.

Unconventional is fairly different from conventional with respect to estimation.

With conventional, one is trying to figure out whether there are fields available which have natural gas (or oil) that can be extracted in the conventional manner. These are discrete fields, and the world has been pretty well explored. It is difficult to find them. This is the reason why we are told that we are discovering less oil each year than we are extracting.

With unconventional, we know fairly well the extent of rocks in place which have natural gas trapped inside of it. I showed a map in Figure 7 for tight gas. Some places will have more sweet spots than others, but for the most part the resource is there. It has already in some sense been discovered, but it doesn't yet pass the proven reserve test.

As I understand it, the amount that is included in proven reserves is the amount that is located in areas which can be drained with existing wells, or has been specifically surveyed and tested. The area nearby in the same formation, which we have every reason to believe is similar to what has been fully surveyed, is "undiscovered".

Advance Resources International is a consulting firm that specializes in unconventional natural gas. They have an amazing amount of material up on their website. This is a link to a document that describes how they derive their estimates.