The low-pitched thrum of natural-gas-fired engines vibrates across the rural valley in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna County, where Cabot Oil & Gas Cabot Oil & Gas is drilling a new well to tap the Marcellus shale formation a mile underground.
As workers swing drilling pipe into the 135-foot-tall rig, a parade of trucks rumbles up the narrow dirt road from Montrose, Pa. Until the shale boom Montrose was best known for its bluestone quarries. Now the roads in this northeastern Pennsylvania county are filled with heavy trucks hauling drilling fluids, pipe and the thousands of tons of sand that drillers pump into the ground to open up fissures in the granite-hard Marcellus and let the gas flow.
Cabot's Pennsylvania wells are natural gas gushers, expected to produce an average of 14 billion cubic feet over a well's 50-year life span, 14 times as much as a typical Oklahoma well. Already the Marcellus shale, extending from New York to West Virginia, is supplying 12 billion cubic feet a day, or almost 15% of U.S. gas demand.
It's well known that the combination of newer horizontal drilling with the 60-year-old practice of hydraulic fracturing has unlocked huge new reserves of oil and gas across North America. What's less well appreciated is how enormous those reserves are–North Dakota's Bakken shale will soon be pumping out nearly twice as much crude per day as Prudhoe Bay in Alaska–and the hundreds of billions of dollars that need to be spent on infrastructure to bring all this oil and gas to market.
"You're going to need pipelines, you're going to need storage and in some cases you're going to need the existing pipelines reversed," says Aaron Visse, who manages the $90 million (assets) Forward Global Infrastructure Fund in San Francisco. "We built this thing the wrong way, and now we've got to adjust."
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