Researchers find new way to discover natural gas

Researchers from Penn State University are testing a new method for exploring natural gas in the Marcellus Shale.

Natural gas hot spots are traditionally found using a combination of current well production data and geological tests. The researchers developed a method for approximating available gas using well production data taken from more than 5,600 existing wells with at least two years of production logs.

Researchers examined the amount of production loss over time and then applied these declines over the entire region to create a heat map of available natural gas. Findings were validated using geological maps.

“Rather than looking at these geological proxies for production we’re just looking at production itself,” Eugene Morgan, assistant professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, said. “By looking at just production and mapping, we see that it agrees really well with these geological variables related to production, which validates our approach. By looking at production alone, you’re directly targeting the information you’re after.”

The method was nearly as effective at forecasting as costly geological data sampling, Morgan said.

The next step will be to fine-tune cluster sampling used in the initial research to improve accuracy.