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107 comments on US Natural Gas: The Role of Unconventional Gas
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107 comments on US Natural Gas: The Role of Unconventional Gas
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I remember reading that in Canada there are vast tight gas reserves. The gas in Canada is much harder to extract than the tight gas in the US, but it totals several times the Worlds conventional natural gas reserves. The next great challenge?
There are tight gas resources around the world. Other than the US, I don't believe that much has been done with them, because other natural gas that was easier to extract has been available.
This is an exhibit from the National Petroleum Council's Facing Hard Truths report showing an estimate of the amount in place (not economically recoverable).
I don't know anything about how difficult Canadian tight gas reserves are to extract. US tight gas reserves were considered impossible, before a lot of research was done.
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.
If nothing else, unconventional takes a long time to ramp up. Besides the infrastructure for the production, one needs the pipelines to take it to the users.
Some new US pipelines have become available in the last year. I think that is part of the reason for the increase in production.
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.
The Wiki NG article on Canadian 4.1 Unconventional gas mentions the "Deep Basin" in Alberta as a massive source of tight gas; maybe that's the one? Low permeability. Dave Cohen's piece Canadian Gas - Decline Sets in likely has more info on tight NG.