Also von wegen, das Fayetteville Shale wird weiter östlich dünner.
Southwestern Energy geht im Gebiet rund um Searcy von einer Schichtdicke von 200, an manchen Stellen sogar 400-500 feet aus!
Und das ist praktisch um die Ecke vom Activa- Pachtgebiet.
Aber wie Hooper schon gesagt hat, es dauert seine Zeit bis man es geologisch analysiert und verstanden hat.
GAS is the word
$5.5 billion profit projected for gas exploration
By Jeremy Peppas
The words “Fayetteville Shale” tend to attract a crowd in these parts.
A full house gathered Tuesday in the Founders Room on the campus of Harding University in Searcy to hear Harold Korell, president and CEO of Southwestern Energy Company give an update on Fayetteville Shale to the Searcy Economics Club.
“We really have to give all the credit to David Evans,” said Jim Carr, chairman of the club. “He was the one who made all the arrangements to get him here and he was the one.”
The interest in hearing Korell speak was obvious — the economic impact of the Fayetteville Shale gas exploration is staggering, around $5.5 billion.
“That is what the University of Arkansas study showed,” Korell said in a post-meeting interview. “But who knows what that’s really going to be? We’ll put in, by the end of this year, a billion and a half and that’s just our company. Its probably going to be greater than that.”
Korell told the crowd that right now, Southwestern Energy has 19 rigs and 400 wells going and have spent $950 million so far this year.
“We are making a big investment,” Korell said. “A really big investment. But it is something that our stockholders, our investors support. What it could mean is important.”
While it has always been known that natural gas was trapped underneath Arkansas, no one really knew how much. In western Arkansas, the thickness of the Fayetteville Shale is about 70 feet and in portions, visible to the naked eye.
“If you’re in Fayetteville, you’ve probably seen it,” Korell said. “Just off College, you know the Chinese restaurant there, that outcropping behind it? That’s Fayetteville Shale.”
It isn’t a Chinese restaurant anymore, but that still didn’t keep the crowd from knowing exactly where Korell was describing.
As the demand for natural gas went up, so did the potential for profit. Southwestern Energy decided to determine how much more gas was out there.
“We started to map it across the area,” Korell said. “What we wanted to know was if it gets thinner or thicker. As that map gets done and as you move east, the shale actually keeps getting thicker and thicker and thicker and it winds up over 200 feet thick. In some areas, clear over here, its 400, 500 feet in some spots.”
The next step was obvious, he said.
“This could really be something worth exploring,” he said. “But it took nine, 10 months of doing all the geological work, recreating the world if you will, in our minds, back to the time of deposition. A lot of science went into it.”
Korell said he normally speaks to civic groups like the Searcy Economics Club about twice a year, but gives regular presentations to investors and Wall Street types.
“I’m on the road a lot,” Korell said. “We have seen a lot of interest in Fayetteville Shale. A lot of interest in what it could mean.”
The majority of the natural gas used in the country comes from the United States, and in Arkansas, Fayetteville Shale is being studied from the Oklahoma state line to White County in the east, stretching across the Ozarks.
To get gas from Fayetteville Shale, you need water because the process for releasing the gas comes from hydraulic fracture stimulation of the rock, or in simpler terms, they use water to break the rock up.
“This area had never actually been drilled,” Korell said. “Never really explored ... We happened to recognize the potential for it as we have higher prices at the same time we have had the technology developments to drill horizontal wells ... It was like a perfect storm, all these things coming together at the same time. Without it we wouldn’t have been able to try them.”
And Korell doesn’t see an end in sight.
“As long as people want gas, we’ll keep looking for it,” he said. “So we’ll be in this area for as long as people want gas.”
Korell did address the impact of that exploration.
“We have been working with the Highway Department,” he said. “We understand why some don’t want the big trucks on their roads. We have some wells, wells that cost $1 million, $1.5 million, just sitting there, because we can’t get back to them, but we are working on a way to fix that. We know that that big trucks cause damage, but we are working on that.”
Korell also addressed the issue of severance taxes, but he said a comparison to Texas was false.
“Texas doesn’t have income tax,” he said. “And Texas does have a severance tax, but they adjust it. The Barnett Shale in Texas is the closest comparison to Fayetteville Shale, and Texas understands the difficulty of getting gas from there, so they have adjusted the severance tax done.”
The severance tax issue is currently being examined by Gov. Beebe and may be addressed legislatively or through an act.
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