The Long-Term Sustainability of Natural Gas Supply effort was initiated largely in response to recommendations presented by the National Petroleum Council (NPC) in their 1999 report, "Meeting the Challenges of the Nation's Growing Natural Gas Demand". NPC specifically noted the benefits of 1) improved knowledge of the size and nature of the resource base, 2) an accurate inventory of resources in the Rocky Mountain region and the impact of federal land access restrictions on them, and 3) efforts to define and prioritize R&D opportunities that will expand the resource potential of both producing and unexplored areas.

In planning its program, the Office of Natural Gas assesses the nation's marginal gas resources to identify the most promising targets for technology-driven resource expansion. NETL concurs with the findings of the 1999 NPC study that the prime candidates for significant near and mid-term resource expansion are unconventional resources including deep reservoirs and deepwater reservoirs.   As stated by the NPC: "All of these new sources of gas require that significant technology hurdles be addressed and overcome in order to deliver cost-competitive supply". 

The power of technology advance to achieve resource expansion has been demonstrated in the past.  Nearly three decades ago, the total domestic natural gas resource base was estimated to be roughly 1,000 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas – nearly half of which had already been consumed.  Over the next two decades, advances in technology, combined with selected policy actions such as tax credits, allowed for more efficient recovery of the known resource.  Most importantly, technology advance enabled the addition of unexpected and prolific new gas resources,  including the deep offshore, coal beds, and tight sandstones.  As a result, the nation has more recoverable gas now than it did 20 years ago, despite consuming roughly 350 trillion cubic feet in the interim .  This phenomenal national R&D success resulted not only in the abatement of gas supply concerns, but allowed the nation to envision the environmental and economic benefits of vast increases in gas use.

Today, despite renewed fears of impending weakness in gas supplies, there remains significant potential for further resource expansion. Clearly, the nation has thus far accessed only a small portion of the total endowment of natural gas.  Vast supplies remain, housed primarily in diffuse, deep, and low-quality deposits that cannot be recovered economically with existing technologies.   The prospects for production from these sources is no more unlikely than the prospects for coal-bed methane and deep-water gas were 30 years ago.   Consequently, the goal of the Long-Term Sustainability of Natural Gas Supplies Program is to improve our understanding of these presently “unrecoverable” gas resources, and provide insight on the most efficient R&D avenues to unlocking their vast potential. 

To improve the reliability of our resource assessment and modeling efforts, detailed characterization of the geographic and geologic distribution of gas-in-place resources is performed for priority basins.  When these new Basin-Centered Gas Assessments are integrated with model improvements and ongoing assessments of industry related technology advances, critical information will be added to the difficult task of planning DOE's exploration and production R&D program. 

Click here for a description of NETLS's requirements for resource data.