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~Marcellus facts courtesy of MarcellusFacts.Com and PAMarcellus.Com
The Devonian Marcellus Formation (or Marcellus Shale) lies 300 to 6,000 feet below the Allegheny Plateau Region of North America and covers over 95,000 square miles, running through Ohio, West Virginia, across Pennsylvania and into New York’s Southern Tier. The formation also touches small areas of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. It gets its name from the original exposed portion of shale (outcropping) found near Marcellus, New York during a geological survey in 1839.
The shale itself is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that is formed when quartz and clay minerals or mud are compacted by pressure over an extended period of time. Shale has a very compressed layer structure and such low permeability that it releases gas very slowly. Shale is rich in organic material and sufficiently brittle but rigid enough to maintain open fractures. Natural gas found in shale is held in its own natural fractures, pore spaces, and on the surface of the organic material is released over time as the pressure in the shale decreases.
The Marcellus shale layer becomes thicker from west to east beginning at about 50 feet in Ohio to more than 100 feet thick in Pennsylvania and New York. Geologists have known about the gas here for years, but the shale has been virtually impossible to permeate – until now. Thanks to recent improvements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and an upturn in the price of natural gas, recovering natural gas in the Marcellus formation has become a viable option.
A combination of factors is driving the interest in developing natural gas from the Marcellus Shale. Primarily, the techniques - like three-dimensional imaging and horizontal drilling - enhanced to produce natural gas economically from other shale formations in the United States, are being used to access gas in the Marcellus Shale formation. Because of past and current drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation, much is known about its characteristics. In addition, the economics between natural gas prices and close proximity to gas-hungry Northeast markets have made the Marcellus Shale an excellent exploration opportunity.
For more on Marcellus Shale, visit MarcellusFacts.Com. Their helpful PDF Fact sheet can be downloaded by Clicking Here.
To see Chesapeake Energy's involvement with Marcellus Shale, along with statistics on Chesapeake in the within the Marcellus formation, visit their Web site by Clicking Here.
