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USA Natural Gas Production and Processing [1]

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Date: 2023-05-24

This article looks at the production side of natural gas in the USA. We’re going to use some charts from the Energy Information Agency starting with the big overview and work through it section by section.

Overview Chart



Gross Withdrawls and Marketed Production

The first section shows the source for gas from:

Natural Gas Wells — Traditional wells.

Crude Oil Wells — Some oil wells produce and capture gasses along with crude.

Coalbed Wells — Some coal mines produce methane gas (very dangerous) and a well is drilled to collect those gasses.

Shale Gas Wells — This is the newest type of gas extraction.

The total amount of “Wet Gas” removed from the ground is called “Gross Withdrawls” and for 2022 that was 43.38 trillion cubic feet. At the well site a certain amount of gas is lost to venting, flaring, non-hydrocarbon gases removed, and gas returned to keep the well pressure steady. Subtracting those items leaves the “Marketed Wet Gas Production”.

So let’s talk about the sources. The first two, natural gas wells and crude oil wells, are self-explanatory and coalbed gas is a minor player so we will ignore it. The last, biggest contributor is shale gas also called tight gas. When a traditional natural gas well is drilled the gas will flow freely through the porous ground and into the pipe to the surface. We have already burned a lot of that gas. The new player is tight gas in shale formations.

The shale is called tight because it is much less porous so the gas flows way too slowly. There is a lot of gas in shale formations which was inaccessible but there is a fix. A mix of water, grit, and chemicals are pumped down the well and through holes in the lower casing which, at very high pressures, fractures the shale. The grit holds the fractures open after the pressure is removed and now we have a very profitable gas well. The picture below shows the “fracking” process, and here is a good video of the fracking process in much more detail.

After the fracking is finished the well becomes a producing well and looks like the picture below. There is some interesting information like over one million gallons of water is used to frack just one well. This is to fracture a very large amount of shale a long distance around the horizontal part of the well. The more shale is fractured, the more gas is produced.

Of course there is the small problem of what to do with all that water (plus chemicals) once the fracking is finished and it comes up the pipe. That is a lot of contaminated water. Also, if there are water wells nearby, the fracking may just open up passages between the gas bearing shale and the water layers. I’m not going into the controversy in this article but here are some links for the interested.

Fracking as a practice for oil and gas wells has been around since the 1800s but became common around 2000 for shale gas extraction. Here is a history showing the growth up to 2022 at which shale gas is 65% of our gross withdrawls.



The mixture of gasses is under very high pressure and temperature when in the ground so, when the pressure is reduced after the well extraction, some components condense into a mix of hydrocarbon liquids. These mixtures are sent to an oil refinery as “Natural Gas Petroleum Liquids” or NPGL. With the gasses that are not methane removed we now have “Dry Gas”. This is piped and burned in furnaces, water heaters, and stoves. But there are some more steps in the process which will be in the next article.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/24/2171047/-USA-Natural-Gas-Production-and-Processing

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