Oil and gas resource plays: new frontiers with enormous potential

Abstract

After 150 years of exploration and production onshore North America, most of the conventional, high-quality resources worth finding have been found. This has not, however, diminished explorations and production (E&P) investment activity since enormous volumes of hydrocarbons locked within oil and gas resource plays remain to be extracted. Individual resource plays—which include coal seam methane, shales, tight sandstones and tight carbonates—can contain several tens of trillions of cubic feet of gas equivalent (TCFGE), with the total prize likely to exceed 1,000 TCFGE. While individual well recoveries are modest (because these deposits often underlie areas of many hundreds of square miles) play-scale production rates and value creation can compete favorably with conventional E&P projects given appropriate fiscal terms and development costs.