New Interest in Cores Taken Thirty Years Ago: The Devonian Marcellus Shale in Northern West Virginia

Katharine Lee Avary and Jack Eric Lewis
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, Morgantown, WV

In the late 1970’s, the US Department of Energy cored a series of wells as part of its Eastern Gas Shales Program. Seven of these cored wells were located in West Virginia. The first five wells in the program targeted the Lower Huron Member of the Ohio Shale in southwestern West Virginia. This black shale has produced from thousands of wells for many decades in southwestern West Virginia and adjacent eastern Kentucky. The last two cored wells in the program focused on the older and deeper shales, the Rhinestreet Shale Member of the West Falls Formation and the Marcellus Shale of the Hamilton Group. Recent interest in the Marcellus Shale in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York has prompted renewed interest in these cores.

During the Eastern Gas Shales Program, a large body of data was collected for all of the cored wells. Recently, the US Department of Energy released a Natural Gas Program Archive on DVD which contains scanned versions of the documents from the Eastern Gas Shales and other unconventional gas resources programs. In an effort to make this information readily available for current evaluations, data from the two WV Marcellus cores, located in Monongalia and Wetzel counties, have been extracted from the reports and summarized. Average total organic carbon ranges from 6.19 to 6.79% while average vitrinite reflectance values range from 1.71 to 2.30 %Ro for the Marcellus in these 2 cores.

Presented AAPG Eastern Section Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2008 © AAPG Eastern Section