What is the difference between Marcellus and Utica Shale?

What is the difference between Marcellus and Utica Shale?

The Marcellus Shale is a deep natural gas reserve running under parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. The Utica Shale is even deeper and larger, covering parts of these states plus Kentucky and Tennessee.

Is Utica deeper than Marcellus?

The Utica Shale is a hydrocarbon-bearing formation residing several thousand feet deeper than the Marcellus Shale throughout the Appalachian Basin, including Pennsylvania.

What is under the Utica Shale?

Distribution. The Utica Shale lies under most of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and extends under adjacent parts of Ontario and Quebec in Canada and Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, and Virginia in the United States.

What general rock type can be found in Utica?

The upper Ordovician Utica Shale is thought to be the primary hydrocarbon source rock, but also the ultimate seal for important, Ordovician Trenton-Black River hydrocarbon reservoirs in the Midwest.

Why is the Marcellus Shale important?

This shale contains significant quantities of natural gas. New devel- opments in drilling technology, along with higher wellhead prices, have made the Marcellus Shale an important natural gas resource.

Is there oil under the Marcellus Shale?

Utica shale, below the Marcellus, contains large gas, oil reserves, study shows. Updated: Oct.

Where is Appalachian Basin?

The Appalachian Basin extends from central Alabama to the Adirondack Mountains in New York. The Basin, which contains up to 40,000 ft of stratified rocks (Colton, 1962), underlies the Valley and Ridge and Appalachian Plateaus physiographic provinces and includes parts of 11 states (fig. 1).

Where is Utica Shale found?

The Utica Shale is a massive formation that lies beneath portions of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Virginia and a part of Canada.

What are the steps in fracking?

Drilling and the Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) Process

  1. Preparation. Preparing a drilling site involves ensuring that it can be properly accessed and that the area where the rig and other equipment will be placed has been properly graded.
  2. Drilling.
  3. Well Completion.
  4. Production.
  5. Well Abandonment.

Where is the Utica Shale?

How much natural gas is in the Utica Shale?

The United States Geological Survey’s mean estimates of undiscovered, technically recoverable unconventional resources indicate that the Utica Shale contains about 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, about 940 million barrels of oil, and 208 million barrels of natural gas liquids [15].

Does Marcellus Shale produce oil?

By early 2015, the Marcellus Shale was yielding about 14.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. In addition, wells in the western part of the play, near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border and westward, were yielding valuable natural gas liquids and small amounts of oil.