Western Australia Shale Gas Studies

Reza Rezaee
Department of Petroleum Engineering, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

The source of natural hydrocarbon (oil and gas) from conventional reservoirs is decreasing rapidly. At the same time global energy consumption is growing sharply in a way that conventional reserves cannot solely assure this demand. Therefore there is an inevitable need for some other sources of energy. Shale gas has been the major target of gas exploration and production in the US and some other countries. Based on recent EIA report there is an estimate of 7,299 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of technically recoverable resources of shale gas within the 41 countries occurring in 137 basins.

Several specific study stages are required to evaluate the shale gas potential for any sedimentary basin. To delineate a potential shale gas, screening criteria has to be evaluated carefully using different available, conventional and unconventional, approaches. Major screening criteria to define sweet spots fall in the Geological, Geochemical, petrophysical and geomechanical areas.

There are several shale formations in the Perth and Canning Basins that are considered to be potential shale gas in the Western Australia. Permo-Triassic Carynginia and Kockatea formations in the Perth Basin, Goldwyer (Ordovician) and Laurel (early Carboniferous) formations in the Canning Basin are the target of the study at this stage.

A research team “Unconventional Gas Research Group, UGRG” has been established at the Department of Petroleum Engineering, Curtin University to study shale gas potential in the Perth and Canning Basins, Western Australia. In this paper different aspects of shale gas reservoirs that have been the subject of UGRG research will be discussed.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90180©AAPG/SEPM/China University of Petroleum/PetroChina-RIPED Joint Research Conference, Beijing, China, September 23-28, 2013