Study develops Fayetteville shale reserves, production forecast

A study of reserve and production potential for the Fayetteville shale in north central Arkansas, forecasts a cumulative 18 tcf of economically recoverable reserves by 2050, with production declining to about 400 bcf/year by 2030 from the current peak of about 950 bcf/year. The forecast suggests the formation will continue to be a major contributor to US natural gas production. The study assesses natural gas production potential in six productivity tiers and uses those tiers to forecast future production. Well economics vary greatly across the basin as a function of productivity, well and other costs, and geology. The study's production forecast model accounts for this granularity, as well as for distributions around natural gas price, drilling cost, economic limit of each well, advances in technology, and many other geologic, engineering, and economic parameters, in order to determine how much natural gas operators will be able to extract economically from future wells in the field.