Discoveries

Some 1,300 people attended a fabulous meeting in Pittsburgh last week. The AAPG-SPE Eastern Meeting, held October 11-15, focused on shales, CO2 sequestration, tight sands and hydrothermal dolomites.

I spent my time in the shale sessions. On Monday, such sessions were so popular that people lined the walls and sat in the aisles, and some couldn’t even get into the room (which had capacity of around 400) at all. Tuesday’s shale talks were moved to a room twice the size, and were nearly full. 

Here’s my Top 5 list of things I learned about the Marcellus, in no particular order:

1.      The Marcellus is an extremely high-quality source rock. Two areas that have generated great volumes of hydrocarbons are southwestern Pennsylvania and southern New York/eastern Pennsylvania.

2.      The organic-rich facies achieves thickness of 250 feet in southern New York/eastern Pennsylvania.

3.      Three units make up the Marcellus: Oatka Creek Shale, Cherry Valley Limestone (which has different names in various areas), and Union Springs Shale. These have different organic contents, and thicken and thin independently due to non-deposition or erosion.

4.      Typical Marcellus fracs employ 300,000 to 500,000 pounds of proppant and 750,000 gallons of water.  In horizontal wells, guar and cross-linked gels are added on a limited basis.

5.      Marcellus pressure gradients vary from .40 to .58 psi. The core area of the play sprawls across some 18 million acres.

–by Peggy Williams, Senior Exploration Editor, Oil and Gas Investor

pwilliams@hartenergy.com           

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