Gas data show steady climb in production through 2011

BY LAURA LEGERE

Times-Shamrock Writer

Natural gas production fromPennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale wells continued to climb in the second half of 2011, according to data reported Friday by the Department of Environmental Protection.

Pennsylvania’s deep gas wells pumped out 607 billion cubic feet of gas between July and December, bringing the year’s total production to a milestone 1 trillion cubic feet – enough to surpass the amount of natural gas used in the state each year.

By the end of the year, 2,210 of the commonwealth’s shale wells were tied into pipelines and producing gas – a 35 percent increase in the number of producing wells since the first half of 2011 that helped account for a 40 percent jump in production.

The average amount of gas produced daily during the six-month period – 3.3 billion cubic feet per day – was slightly less than industry projections.

A July report funded by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, aPennsylvaniaindustry group, projected an average production of about 3.5 billion cubic feet per day by 2011.

The study’s estimate was based on drillers’ anticipated drilling plans for the year, but many producers cut back on both production and drilling as natural gas prices dropped.

Eight of the 10 top-producing wells for the half were Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. wells in Dimock and Springville townships,SusquehannaCounty, including the top producing well, the King 2 in Dimock, which produced 3 billion cubic feet of gas.

Cabot’s King 2 well also had the best daily average production over the period, producing 16.5 million cubic feet per day.

The other top-producing wells for the period were a Range Resources well in Canton Twp.,WashingtonCounty, and the Citrus Energy Corp. Ruark East 1H well in Washington Twp.,WyomingCounty.

The state’s Marcellus wells also produced 10 million barrels of wastewater during the last six months of 2011, about 500,000 barrels more than the amount produced during the first half of the year. A barrel is equal to 42 gallons.

More than three-quarters of the liquid waste – which includes both fluids from the drilling process and the salt- and metals-laden liquid that returns from a well after hydraulic fracturing – was either directly reused in new wells or taken to treatment plants that recycle it.

More than 1.7 million barrels of the waste fluid was trucked to deep disposal wells, mostly inOhio.

The rock waste, or cuttings, from wells drilled during the last half of 2011 totaled 385,000 tons.

Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore and Throop accepted 12,500 tons of the cuttings during the period, a sharp decline from the 36,000 tons it received in the first half of 2011. Alliance Landfill in Taylor and Ransom Twp. took in 1,250 tons.

The six-month data released by the state offer a production snapshot that operators were previously allowed to keep confidential for five years before state law changed in 2010.

But the data has so far done little to help experts evaluate the shale’s long-term potential or chart the rate at which production from the gas wells declines.

Terry Engelder, aPennStateUniversitygeosciences professor whose research anticipated the wealth of gas in the Marcellus, said without at least monthly public production reports “gas well performance can not be analyzed in a sensible way.”

He suggested that a recently downgraded federal estimate of the amount of gas in the Marcellus can be attributed at least in part to the “unreliable nature” of developing resource estimates “based exclusively on data that come from 12 and 6 month periods.”

He has had to ask individual royalty owners to share their monthly gas-production records in order to more accurately trace how quickly gas production drops off – crucial information for gleaning how much a well will ultimately produce in its lifetime.

Mandating monthly data reports would require another change in state law, he said, but without it “we continue to have confusion about just how rich the Marcellus really is.”