Regional Oil/Gas Plays

Marcellus Shale
The Marcellus Shale is a black, low density, organic rich shale that lies beneath all of Garrett County and the westernmost portion of Allegany County in Maryland as well as much of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and New York. It is projected that nearly 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could be produced from the Marcellus Shale. The Marcellus Shale was not widely considered to be an important gas resource until technology for tapping it had been proven in other natural gas shale plays. The drilling of natural gas wells into the Marcellus Shale is a highly technical process. Capturing the gas that is locked away in the shale requires drilling companies to use processes such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

Utica Shale
The Utica shale is a large rock formation that spans an area from Ohio to Pennsylvania and across the Canadian border. The Utica shale takes its name from the city of Utica, New York, where it outcrops or appears on the surface. It was first identified along Starch Factory creek near the town of Utica. The area of the play in Canada covers over 5,000 square Km along the St. Lawrence River and lowlands. The Utica shale lies thousands of feet below the Marcellus shale and is proving to hold impressive quantities of natural gas, oil and natural gas liquids. Geologists believe that the Utica shale could rival the massive Marcellus shale in terms of potential for oil and gas.

Click on the images below to get a better idea of where the Marcellus and Utica shale is located. Please note, while these map were created using a lot of information, there is a lot of information that was not included and may overstate or understate some specifics.

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Hydraulic Fracturing
Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is a technology used to extract nat­ural gas that lies within a shale rock formation thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface. Combined with another technique called “horizontal drilling,” natural gas companies are able to drill for previously untapped reserves. Horizontal drilling allows one surface well to tap gas trapped over hundreds of acres. Once the conventional vertical drill hits the shale formation, it turns horizontally in several directions, much like the spokes of a wheel. The well is then cased with steel and cement. Explosives are places at intervals along the horizontal section of the well to perforate the steel casing. Under very high pressure, a combination of water, sand and chemicals is sent deep into the earth to create cracks and fissures in the shale rock. Those fissures are held open by the sand, allowing the natural gas to flow through those cracks, into the well bore and up to the surface.