According to a July 2015 report from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), the productivity of the natural gas wells in the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale account for 85% of production growth since 2012. According to the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report (DPR), the northeast natural gas wells have driven the recent growth in the U.S. natural gas production as a whole.
The DPR basically provides a month-ahead estimate of oil and natural gas production for the most significant shale formations in the country. The natural gas production activity in the Marcellus region, including Pennsylvania and West Virginia, makes up not only the Marcellus Shale formation, but also parts of the Utica shale and other natural gas formations that lay beneath other states.
The Specifics
The DPR identifies trends in total production and rig productivity, articulated as new-well gas production per rig. The July publication of the DPR detailed that the average new-well gas production per rig in the Marcellus Shale region was 3.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day (MMcf/d) back in January 2012. In July 2015, new-well gas production per rig had increased to 8.3 MMcf/d) due to the increase in the amount of natural gas produced in the Marcellus region during the same period. The DPR also indicates that the Marcellus region produced an estimated 6.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day (Bcf/d) in January 2012, which increased to 16.5 Bcf/d in July 2015.
The EIA reports that this increase in natural gas production from these northeast regions could be due to many different factors, including:
- Greater use of advanced drilling techniques
- Increased number of stages used in hydraulic fracturing operations
- Increased use of techniques such as zipper fracturing (simultaneous fracturing of individual stages of two parallel horizontal wells)
- Use of specific components during well completion that aid in increasing fracture size and porosity of the geologic formation being targeted
Other Data
In addition to this report, the EIA also published additional data saying that the gas produced in the U.S. shale basins also accounts for 56% of the total dry natural gas production in the country. The northeast region, being the Marcellus and Utica Shale, are indeed the driving force behind the total United States’ natural gas production.
Looking Ahead
Of course, as reported, United States’ Shale deposits have had an increase in production over the last few years, which begs the question: what are we doing to help? The problem with this increase in production is that the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep up with it. We have to look to the future and figure out ways to build the pipelines in order to transport the natural gas we so desperately need from the producer to the consumer in an efficient manner.
