Assessment

With three natural gas transmission pipelines down and Aliso Canyon underground gas storage operations limited, an updated assessment of winter energy supplies issued Tuesday indicated the Southern California region faces greater uncertainty than a year ago, with gas curtailments to large industrial users more likely.

A biennial report conducted by the nonprofit Potential Gas Committee (PGC) found shale gas plays in the Appalachian Basin represented the greatest increase to estimated future potential natural gas supplies in the United States, which were a record 3,141 Tcf at the end of 2016.

A national government inquiry is urging Canada to steer in the opposite direction of the United States by expanding environmental regulation of natural gas, oil, pipeline, mining and public works projects.

In the largest estimate ever of unconventional oil in the United States, the U.S. Geological Survey said the Wolfcamp Shale within the Permian Basin’s Midland formation in West Texas contains an estimated mean of 20 billion bbl of oil, 16 Tcf of associated natural gas and 1.6 billion bbl of natural gas liquids.

FERC has issued an environmental assessment (EA) for a trio of projects to enable Texas Eastern Transmission LP (Tetco) to transport up to an additional 662,000 Dth/d of natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales on its mainline from Pennsylvania to points in Ohio, Kentucky and Mississippi.

Canada’s natural gas inventory has grown by 219 Tcf, based on the first official forecast of shale supplies that horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing would make available in the northern Liard Basin of British Columbia (BC).

For the second time in less than six weeks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board (SAB) has released a draft report that tweaks its landmark assessment last year that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) poses no “widespread, systemic impacts” to drinking water.

The Barnett Shale may have lost some of its allure as producers chased other unconventional prizes, but an updated federal assessment indicates the venerable North Texas play holds nearly double the amount of undiscovered natural gas, liquids and oil resources than estimated in 2003.

Anchored by the Appalachian Basin, the Atlantic area’s technically recoverable natural gas resource base has risen an estimated 24% since 2012, more than any other area offshore and onshore in the United States, the Potential Gas Committee (PGC) said in the new biennial report.