How Much Marcellus Gas Is There, Anyway?

Kim Payn­ter / WHYY/Newsworks.org

Shale lies beneath forests and farms in Lycoming County, Pa.

Squab­bling over just how much gas lies within the Mar­cel­lus Shale con­tin­ues, after two fed­eral gov­ern­ment agen­cies came to two vastly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions this summer.

A report released Tues­day by the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey on the amount of recov­er­able nat­ural gas in the Mar­cel­lus Shale directly con­tra­dicts an Energy Depart­ment report from July. The U.S.G.S cal­cu­lates about 84 tril­lion cubic feet of nat­ural gas lies within the shale for­ma­tion beneath a large part of Penn­syl­va­nia, New York, and Ohio. But in July, the Energy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion released a study that showed more than 400 tril­lion cubic feet. That’s a big gap.

Dif­fer­ent method­ol­ogy could explain it. James Cole­man is a geol­o­gist for the U.S.G.S. He authored Tuesday’s report, and says he met with offi­cials from the Energy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion on Wednes­day to try to deter­mine what happened.

“Maybe we’re look­ing at the same thing, and we’re look­ing at a part of it and they’re look­ing at the whole thing. We’re try­ing to under­stand how we could have come to two very dif­fer­ent num­bers,” he said.

Cole­man says it’s likely to see dif­fer­ent esti­mates from sep­a­rate agen­cies, but not a gap of such mag­ni­tude. While gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists are meet­ing, Cole­man says there’s no answer for the diver­gent mea­sures, so far.

A spokesman for the E.I.A told StateIm­pact that the U.S.G.S is the gold stan­dard for mea­sur­ing the gas in the Mar­cel­lus Shale.