The Office of Natural Gas (ONG) recognizes that a better understanding of our nation's emerging, overlooked, and undervalued natural gas resources is crucial to developing effective strategies for natural gas technology development.

Over the past decade, the ONG has worked closely with the United States Geological Survey to produce a series of ground-breaking assessments of the Gas-in-Place in Western Basins.  This work, highlighted by the conclusion that western basins hold roughly 6,000 Trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas-in-place, has been highly instrumental in raising industry awareness of the potential of the basins and spurring the technology development that is rendering an increasing share of this resource recoverable.  The USGS has also prepared, with ONG support, a review and assessment of Deep Gas Resources throughout the U.S., highlighting those areas with the most promising deep gas potential.

In an effort to identify the most promising technological avenues to expand the nation's producible gas resource base, the ONG is developing a program of Technology Needs Assessments that include both resource characterization and analytical modeling of critical gas-bearing regions.  This effort differs from the resource assessments conducted periodically by other organizations in that ONG makes special effort to include resources that are not now, nor expected to become under business-as-usual scenarios, economically or technically recoverable.  The assessments are also done at a high level of stratigraphic and structural detail to ensure that the models have an opportunity to measure the sensitivity of resource recovery to issues such drilling cost.  This effort is designed to provide ONG planners with insight as to why certain resources are not recoverable, and what breakthrough technologies may be needed to make them so.  In addition, the program will provide valuable information into the impact of selected federal policies on future supplies, including those related to industry access to currently marginal and sub-economic resources on Federal lands.