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A study written by J. David Hughes and published in February by the Post Carbon Institute claims that shale gas reserves are vastly overstated. “Drill Baby Drill – Can Unconventional Fuels Usher In a New Era of Energy Abundance?”  A companion article by Deborah Rogers claims that the shale “frenzy” is a Wall-Street-created bubble, that “U.S. shale gas and shale oil reserves have been overestimated by a minimum of 100% and by as much as 400-500% by operators according to actual well production data filed in various states,” and that “shale oil wells are following the same steep decline rates and poor recovery efficiency observed in shale gas wells.” “Shale and Wall Street: Was the Decline in Natural Gas Prices Orchestrated?” Both are published on a website called shalebubble.org.  These nay-sayers are continuing a tradition that has followed the oil and gas industry for decades – the debate between the peak-oil advocates and those who believe we will never run out of fossil fuels.

David Hughes’ study is worth reading. He studied more than 60,000 shale wells in the US and their rates of decline, costs and reserves. Hughes concludes that more than 1,542 wells will have to be drilled each year in the Bakken and Eagle Ford plays just to maintain current production, at a cost of $14 billion per year. He estimates that it will take $42 billion and more than 7,000 wells per year to maintain current levels of production of shale gas, whereas the value of the gas produced in 2012 was only $32.5 billion. Some examples from Hughes’ study:

On overly optimistic predictions by the Energy Information Administration:

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The pipeline industry bill intended to “fix” the issues raised by Texas Rice Land Partners v. Denbury Pipeline, appears to be dead in the Texas legislature. The issue: requiring pipelines that assert the power of eminent domain to prove that they qualify as common carriers. The Texas Supreme Court held in Denbury that simply filing a form with the Texas Railroad Commission would not suffice; the pipeline has to show that it will actually use the pipeline to transport oil or gas for hire. This requirement could substantially slow the condemnation process, requiring pipelines to prove their common-carrier status each time they sue to condemn a right-of-way.

The solution proposed by the pipelines: have one hearing, at the Texas Railroad Commission, to establish that a proposed new line will in fact qualify for common-carrier status. That determination will then be binding on all landowners whose property will be crossed by the pipeline. Those landowners would be given the opportunity to participate in the hearings; notice of the hearings would be given by publication in local newspapers. The Texas Farm Bureau, the forestry industry, and other landowner groups opposed the bill. Most major oil and gas asociations favored the bill.

The bill, HB 2748, was defeated Friday on a procedural point of order raised by Democrats that moved it back to committee. Rural Republican representatives were faced with a difficult decision whether to support the bill, in light of opposition by rural landowners. Time is running out before the end of the session and it may be difficult to revive the bill.

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A recent editorial in the Houston Chronicle makes a good point: we should no longer think of “oil and gas” together. Their paths have diverged, at least in the US.

The prices of oil and gas used to be roughly equivalent, based on their energy value – their Btu content. But since the shale revolution in the US, this is no longer the case. Today, gas is much cheaper than oil on an energy-equivalent basis. Today, most exploration companies have moved from gas shale plays to oil shale plays, chasing the higher oil price. But gas prices have recently risen, and wells are still being drilled profitably in the Marcellus. If gas returns to $5-6/mcf, shale gas plays will return, and gas will still be much cheaper than oil.

Second, gas is a clean-buring fuel, unlike oil or coal. US emissions of greenhouse gases have declined substantially since utilities have gradually switched from coal to gas. Vehicles powered by gas have much lower emissions than those fueled by gasoline. Gas is touted as a “bridge fuel” in the transition from hydrocarbon to renewable sources of energy, because of its lighter environmental footprint.

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Information below passed on to me by a client, from a friend of a friend:

 

Following are charts and photos of a tour of Cline Shale exploration and operations yesterday afternoon. I remember the boom in the 50s and the late 70s. Those are minimal compared to the massive and very expensive boom taking place right now. I never imagined anything like this.

For instance, there are no small operators involved. Everyone leasing, building, drilling and operating has to be a major with very deep pockets. The road you will see in the first photo cost over $1 million to build. The wells are hitting 9,000 feet in this area and much deeper in other places. Each hydraulic fracturing operation (fracking) uses more than 5 million gallons of water. In just this area, railroad sidings have been built in Miles, San Angelo and Barnhart to unload sand and load oil. The railroad trains in San Angelo used to consist of a few dozen cars a week and now consist of 500 cars a day. And, really, this is just getting started.

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The drought in Texas, along with improved recyclying technology, has driven efforts to increase recycling of water used in hydraulic fracturing of wells. According to one estimate, the fracing of wells in 2011 consumed on the order of 135 billion gallons of water – about 0.3 percent of total U.S. freswater consumption. (Golf courses in the U.S. consume about 0.5 percent of all freswater used in the country.) But if you own land in the Eagle Ford field, those numbers don’t mean much. Water use in some counties is lowering the water table in the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the principal source of frac water for the Eagle Ford, causing some existing wells to dry up. In West Texas, the lack of available groundwater has forced companies to look at recyclying their frac water to extend the useful life of the water they can find for fracing.

Two bills now pending in the Texas legislature – House Bills 3537 and 2992 – would require the Texas Railroad Commission to develp rules to require rthe recycling and reuse of frac water returned from wells. The Commission has recently adopted rules to make it easier for operators to recycle water. And another bill, House Bill 379, would impose a 1-cent-per-barrel fee on wastewater disposed of in commercial injection wells.

Devon Energy, a leader in recycling of frac water in the Barnett Shale, testified to Texas lawmakers that recycling is 50 to 75 percent more expensive than sending frac water to injection wells. There are now about 50,000 injection wells in Texas, and the number is growing rapidly. Recyling is much more common in the Marcellus, where injection wells are not available and water must be hauled long distances for disposal.

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Range Resources

Range Resources’ battle with the Lipskys and Alisa Rich continues, now in a confusing appeal of the trial court’s order denying the Lipskys’ and Rich’s motion to throw out Range’s counterclaim under the Texas law prohibiting so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs.  http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/04/02/4745433/appeals-judges-return-range-suit.html

Earthquakes and Disposal Wells

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State Representative Harold Dutton, Jr. has introduced a bill in the Texas Legislature to amend Texas’ Open Beaches Act. What does this have to do with oil and gas, you may ask? Read on.

Last year, the Texas Supreme Court decided a case interpreting the Open Beaches Act, Severance v. Patterson, 370 S.W.3d 705 (Tex. 2012). The case arose because of Hurricane Rita. Carol Severance owned two beachfront houses on Galveston Island, as rental properties. Because of Hurricane Rita, erosion shifted the beach vegetation line farther landward, causing both homes to be located on the dry beach facing the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, under the Open Beaches Act, the Commissioner of the General Land Office informed Severance that she would have to remove the houses and offered her $40,000 assistance to relocate or demolish them. Severance then sued the Commissioner in US District Court claiming that the Commissioner’s action constituted a taking of her property without compensation under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. Her case was dismissed, and she appealed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, after analyzing the case, concluded that Texas law was unclear on the matter, and it submitted “certified questions” to the Texas Supreme Court.

To understand the significance of Severance v. Patterson, it is necessary to go back a ways, to the Texas Supreme Court case of Luttes v. State, 324 S.W.2d 167 (1958). In that case, Mr. Luttes was claiming to own about 3,400 acres of “mud flats” lying on the edge of the Laguna Madre in Cameron County. The State of Texas holds title to all submerged lands along the coast, including lands within the Laguna Madre, the long, shallow lagoon that runs between the mainland and Padre Island along much of the Texas Gulf Coast. Mr. Luttes contended that these mud flats were part of his “dry land”, and not “submerged land” belonging to the State.

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Production allocation wells continue to be a simmering issue in Texas. Last Friday I attended the Ernest E. Smith Institute on Oil, Gas and Mineral Law sponsored by the University of Texas School of Law, and one of the topics presented was a paper titled “Drafting Production Sharing Agreements.” The paper included information about allocation wells.

I’ve written about allocation wells before, here and here. The Texas Railroad Commission uses that term to refer to a horizontal well that is drilled across the boundary line of two leases or units without pooling the two leases or units. Up until recently, it was assumed that the Commission would not grant a permit for such a well. Several years ago, operators began applying for permits to drill “production sharing agreement” wells. Those are wells drilled across the boundary line of two existing leases or pooled units, where the operator has obtained a “production sharing agreement” from some or all of the royalty owners to drill such a well. The production sharing agreement with the royalty owners provides that production from the well is allocated between or among the tracts crossed by the well lateral, for purposes of calculating royalties due, based on the number of feet of well lateral on each tract compared to the total lateral length of the well. In 2008, the Commissioners agreed that they would grant permits for production sharing agreement wells if at least 65% in interest of the royalty owners in all tracts on which the well would be located had signed production sharing agreements.

According to the paper submitted to the seminar, to date some 700 production sharing agreement – or “PSA” – well permits have been granted by the Commission. More than 600 of those were granted to Devon Energy.

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I recently read this astounding report from the Texas Tribune:

“In 2011, Texas used a greater number of barrels of water for oil and natural gas fracking (about 632 million) than the number of barrels of oil it produced (about 441 million), according to figures from the Texas Water Development Board and the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator.”

Of course wells use all of the water in the fracing process, at the beginning of the well’s life, and continue to produce oil for many years, so oil production will eventually catch up with water use. But this is nevertheless a remarkable statistic.

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UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology has issued a comprehensive report on the estimated reserves in the Barnett Shale Field. The study, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at 16,000 wells in the field. It has been submitted for peer review before publication, but a summary of the report can be found on the BEG website.

The BEG created a model with data from 15,000 wells drilled through 2010. Assuming a $4 constant gas price, the model predicts another 13,000 wells through 2030. It predicts total field production of 44 Tcf of gas through 2050. Here are two images showing results of the study:

BEG Barnett Shale 1.JPG

BEG Barnett Shale 2.JPG

 

The BEG plans to complete similar studies of the Marcellus, Haynesville and Fayetteville Shales by the end of 2013.

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John McFarland
 Graves, Dougherty, Hearon & Moody, P.C.
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