Haynesville Shale Fuels Boom in Northwest Louisiana
Published May 18, 2009
Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas could lie below Northwest Louisiana in what is known as the Haynesville Shale.
Geologists had known about a major natural gas deposit buried in the Haynesville Shale below Northwest Louisiana and East Texas for years. But the fact had all the excitement of knowing there’s sunken treasure on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Getting hold of the riches more than two miles below ground was too hard and too expensive to bother with.
But in 2008, rising energy costs and technological advances in horizontal drilling suddenly put the gas within reach.
The new reality crystallized when Chesapeake Energy, the country’s largest independent producer of natural gas, announced a discovery in the Haynesville Shale with the potential for a “larger impact on the company than any other play in which it participated to date.”
Soon people were talking about the biggest gas field in the country spread over 3 million acres.
The resulting beeline made instant millionaires out of people whose land suddenly had more value than they ever could have imagined. Land men overwhelmed clerks-of-courts in the scramble to secure mineral rights.
DeSoto Parish received a windfall of $27 million from leasing the land.
Calm returned in late 2008 as the national economy cooled and gas producers turned from securing leases to starting operations. But the Haynesville Shale is still primed to transform the Northwest Louisiana economy as demand for the environmentally friendly fuel rebounds, says Kevin McCotter, a Chesapeake spokesman.
“We see the long-term wealth impact for Northwest Louisiana as being practically unimaginable,” he says.
Shreveport, the largest city on the Haynesville Shale, saw its first well in February 2009 – the first on the shale in such an urban environment.
Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, says the discovery will make Northwest Louisiana the envy of many other areas.
“It’s going to feel a lot better in Northwest Louisiana than in a lot of places in the country,” he says.
The shale holds trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, Briggs says, likely making it the fourth-largest gas field in the world and the biggest in the United States.
And not only is the supply plentiful, it’s clean burning, Briggs says, meaning the Haynesville Play will be a big priority for producers.
Companies have already invested tens of millions of dollars into securing rights and setting up wells, so they’ll need to continue drilling, Briggs says.
Chesapeake, for one, went from five rigs on the Haynesville Shale in April 2008 to 19 at the end of year with expectations of reaching 26 by the end of 2009, McCotter says.
“The only thing that has cooled off is the leasing environment,” he says “The expansion of operation activities has not diminished in the least.”
More Insight: Turning Gas Into Gold
The Haynesville Shale natural gas field is a shale rock deposit some 10,000 to 13,000 feet below Northwest Louisiana, East Texas and parts of Arkansas. The Haynesville Shale Play is sometimes referred to as Shreveport Shale or Louisiana Shale. Experts estimate that the Haynesville Shale formation is spread over some 3 million acres and holds between 20 trillion and 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That would make the formation the largest such deposit in the United States. The Haynesville Shale is a rock formation composed of clay-sized particles deposited and buried in Northwest Louisiana more than 170 million years ago. The formation has been known about for years, but only recently have energy prices and technology advances made it economically feasible for energy companies to drill for the gas.
Story by Sam Scott
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