Reduced drilling could be beneficial

With the price of natural gas near record lows, Chesapeake Energy Corporation will cut production in the Barnett Shale because drilling is no longer as profitable. That fact, however, has failed to dampen the mood at the TCU Energy Institute.

Chesapeake, the second largest producer in the Barnett Shale, announced that the company’s dry gas wells would be reduced by two-thirds from the 2011 average.

Ken Morgan, director and associate dean of the TCU Energy Institute, said he believed cutting production would be the first step toward making natural gas a more widely used source of energy.

Natural gas has the most potential to become the backbone of the energy industry because there is so much of it, Morgan said. It is a cheap, domestic fuel that can support green technologies on days when there is no wind for wind farms, he said.

Morgan said natural gas is almost one-fifth the cost of oil, and at any moment the U.S. could go from making natural gas locally to exporting it, because the energy market moves quickly.

“We happen to be the Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” Morgan said.

TCU Energy Club President J.B. Litterer said this was an exciting time for all students going into the energy industry. Chesapeake’s decision to reduce drilling was the first major push to change the price of natural gas to benefit all the parties involved, he said.

Engineering solutions have made natural gas fuel cheaper to get to, and we now have vehicles that could take advantage of that, Litterer said. Students studying engineering have realized that working in the natural gas industry is the new thing, he said.

Litterer said he believed developments in the natural gas industry would reduce America’s dependency on foreign oil.

Natural gas is a game-changer in the energy industry, and students from the TCU Energy Institute would be prepared to embrace the change, Morgan said.

Morgan said the Barnett Shale and other shale rock formations have been the source rocks for the entire petroleum energy industry for 100 years but have never been drilled.

The Barnett Shale, a geologic formation composed of the sedimentary rock shale, stretches through 20 counties both in and around TCU and Fort Worth and is estimated to contain 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the Chesapeake Energy Corporation website. According to the website, Tarrant County is one of the major drilling areas.