DOE widens gas recovery project to Gulf of Mexico

The U.S. Department of Energy has expanded a southern Texas gas recovery program to include the northern Gulf of Mexico. DOE and the University of Texas' Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at Austin will join with gas producers in a $9 million, 4-year effort to identify advanced technologies and methods for recovering gas that has been bypassed in Gulf of Mexico fields. Energy Sec. Bill Richardson said that the program has identified techniques that have "helped rewrite the book" on how gas

Nov. 30, 1998

2 min read

The U.S. Department of Energy has expanded a southern Texas gas recovery program to include the northern Gulf of Mexico.

DOE and the University of Texas' Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at Austin will join with gas producers in a $9 million, 4-year effort to identify advanced technologies and methods for recovering gas that has been bypassed in Gulf of Mexico fields. Energy Sec. Bill Richardson said that the program has identified techniques that have "helped rewrite the book" on how gas is produced in many areas of the U.S.

Program benefits

DOE said that, in the last decade, the program has found production strategies and methods that have added more than $1 billion worth of gas reserves in South Texas and that have helped revitalize gas production elsewhere in the Midcontinent region.

It said that, before the program began in 1988, the traditional approach was to drill production wells at widely spaced intervals and assume that the gas would drain in a generally uniform manner. But, DOE said, the BEG studies showed that this left large amounts of gas behind pipe, trapped in parts of the formation or in deeper zones.

BEG and its industry partners used a variety of technological innovations, such as 3D seismic and vertical seismic profiling to drill infill wells to tap "secondary gas" deposits that had been missed.

DOE said that, when those practices were used on the Texas Gulf Coast, successful gas well completions jumped 24% from 1993 to 1996. The increased success rate is likely to add as much as $1.3 billion in new gas production revenues through 2000.

It said, "In the Midcontinent's Fort Worth basin, producers have completed wells in gas fields discovered over 50 years ago that are today flowing at a healthy 2 MMcfgd, a rate comparable to many new gas fields.

"Some studies have estimated that the U.S. might (ultimately) recover more than 500 tcf-more than triple the current estimates of proven gas reserves-by employing techniques identified in this program."

DOE said that the Gulf of Mexico basin accounts for more than 25% of U.S. gas production. It noted that the geologically complex northern gulf has thousands of reservoirs and that "there is potential for enormous gas resources to have been bypassed even in well-produced, mature fields."