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The story of commercial shale gas production is unique in the history of oil and gas
production in the United States. It is a story spanning nearly two centuries,
and one that includes early commercial exploitation and decades of neglect. When
the 1st commercial shale gas well was drilled in 1821Thomas Jefferson was still alive.
Although, it was only 27 feet deep into the Devonian Dunkirk Shale, residents of
the town of Fredonia, New York were happy to use the gas to light their homes.
Exploration spurred by this well helped establish the Appalachian Basin as the
world's largest known occurrence of natural gas by 1926.
Recently, exploration in the Barnett Shale has sparked a resurgent interest in shale gas.
Current production from the Barnett Shale exceeds 1 bcf per day, and total production
from the other shale gas plays in the U.S. exceeds 600 bcf per year. To date, more
than 40,000 shale gas wells have been drilled, and estimates for the total gas in place
range from 500 to 780 tcf.
Shale gas is conventional natural gas that is produced from reservoirs predominantly composed
of shale with lesser amounts of other fine grained rocks rather than from more conventional
sandstone or limestone reservoirs. The gas shales are often both the source rocks and
the reservoir for the natural gas, which is stored in three ways: adsorbed onto
insoluble organic matter called kerogen, trapped in the pore spaces of the fine-grained
sediments interbedded with the shale, and confined in fractures within the shale itself.
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