12:00 AM CST on Sunday, December 26, 2010
By WENDY HUNDLEY / The Dallas Morning Newswhundley@dallasnews.com
Although Fort Worth has been at the epicenter of natural gas activity in the Barnett Shale, drilling has been moving steadily eastward.
In recent years, gas wells have sprouted on the landscapes of Grand Prairie, Irving, Flower Mound, Grapevine and other mid-city communities.
Now the city of Dallas and residents in Lewisville are being courted by companies that want to tap into the rich underground deposits.
Will mineral owners in McKinney, Plano, Garland and Mesquite be next in line to find lucrative lease offers in the mail?
Current technology suggests the underground geological formations in North Texas will block eastward expansion.
"There is a definite boundary," said Ed Ireland, executive director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council.
That boundary is the Ouachita Thrust Fault, a geological formation thought to mark the eastern edge of the Barnett Shale.
It bisects Hill County, clips the northwest corner of Ellis County and runs through the northwestern third of Dallas County.
Just inside the Collin County line, it's stopped by another barrier – the Muenster Arch – that marks the northern edge of the gas field as it treks through Denton County and points beyond.
While experts believe these underground formations mark the perimeter of the Barnett Shale, they're quick to point out that scientific advances could change that assumption.
"Based on current technology, we do not anticipate the Barnett Shale moving that much further east," Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business, wrote in an e-mail.
But he adds a caveat: "Twenty years from now, we may have technology to discover something we don't see today."
Until now, the movement of drilling in the Barnett Shale has followed the path of the richest deposits.
"The core area of the Barnett Shale – Fort Worth is in the middle of it – was drilled first," Ireland said. "The development outside the core area went south and west."
"As that has now been drilled more and more, companies have started to move east. But they know from the geology that the eastern portion is not as productive as the southern and western portions."
As drilling companies move east, "they're going to get on that edge and see if they can get into the shale and if it will be a good producer," said Ken Morgan, director of Texas Christian University's Energy Institute.
But the edge of the productivity isn't easy to define. "They're trying to pin down where the shale really stops," he said.
While the Ouachita and Muenster formations may look like clear-cut boundary lines on a map, Morgan said they may snake around like a winding road.
"There are always geological oddities," he said. "There's no crisp line."
Seismic testing is currently the best way to peer underground, but there's really only one way to determine where the Barnett Shale ends.
"It's the drill bit that will tell us," Morgan said.
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