of nine states, including large areas in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. It even crosses below Lake Erie and into portions of southern Ontario in Canada. But back then, the potential upside in the region was mostly a mystery... Cutting-edge technology was critical to exploiting this huge energy resource in the Northeast... and technology will drive the next supercycle, too.
Chesapeake Energy always seemed to be able to find the money... In the early years, that helped the company become the largest natural gas producer in the country. Later, it got Aubrey and Chesapeake Energy in a lot of trouble. But make no mistake, Aubrey knew a huge opportunity when he saw it... The Marcellus Shale – the resource my friend, Marty, showed him more than 12 years ago – made Pittsburgh a boom town in the mid-2000s. Today, we know the Marcellus Shale is a massive resource play. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that 141 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas is contained within its rocks... The formation stretches through parts
THE WINNING TICKET
More than a dozen years ago, I took a job with EOG because the company had excelled with directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – in central Texas’ Barnett Shale. I wanted to be part of a team that was using advancements like these to transform the oil and gas industry. In the first quarter of 2005, we began to analyze the Marcellus Shale... We quickly realized its immense size and the magnitude of the opportunity in front of us. Our geologists and engineers determined that the Marcellus Shale rocks contained high levels of total organic carbon. This meant the rocks were full of natural gas.
48 | September 2017
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