Times of India: What India Can do on Shale Gas: California’s Travails Have Many Lessons

The success that the United States has had with shale gas and oil is widely touted, but often ignored are the struggles that one of its largest states, California, has experienced with exploiting shale, a sedimentary rock formation. In fact, California’s travails hold many lessons for India.

To begin with, there has been utter confusion about California’s shale reserves. Initially, it was believed that the state’s Monterey Shale deposits contained 13.7 billion barrels of oil. Fresh estimates from the US Energy Information Administration have slashed this number by 96%, to about 600 million barrels of oil.

In India too, shale gas estimates have varied substantially. (Shale gas is just natural gas and shale oil a substitute for conventional crude oil. The terms shale gas and oil are being interchangeably utilised in this article because they are found in similar shale basins and their method of extraction too is alike.)

The US EIA believes that India’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves are about 95 trillion cubic feet (tcf). Technically recoverable resources represent all the oil and gas that can be produced with current technology, industry practice and geologic knowledge. MORE