A geologic formation 12,000 feet below the surface in northwest Louisiana could contain enough natural gas to supply much of America's needs for the next 10 to 15 years or more, state oil and gas officials say.


The activity in the area from the Arkansas line down to Natchitoches and over to Ruston "is exciting," said Chris John, president of Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association.

"It's mind-boggling" how much national interest is being focused on the primarily rural area by major companies that had written off producing in the state, John said. But "the really big presence is yet to come. In the next year or so, there will be two or three times the number of wells."

The latest estimate about the size of the Haynesville Shale tops 240 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, but John says "frankly, we really don't know."

"It is possibly the fourth largest gas discovery in the world and the largest in the United States," said Don Briggs, head of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association. "It's big."

So far, Shell, Conoco, Chesapeake, Petrohawk and EnCana, a Canadian company that's one of the largest oil and gas producers, are involved in Louisiana. Devon Energy soon will get into the fray, Briggs said.

Drilling the shale is expensive, he said, and until fairly recently, the technology did not exist to get the gas out from between the layers of shale.

"The shale lays like blankets — flat blankets of geologic formations on top of each other" Briggs said. "You go down 12,000 feet, on average, make a right angle and go another 3,000 to 4,000 feet. It's incredible technology."

With the record amounts being paid for leases, bonuses and up to 25 percent royalties (percentage of profits), "a lot of millionaires are being made," Briggs said. He said he has a friend with a 320-acre hunting lease that cost a couple thousand dollars and "today, he's got $4 million in his pocket," from agreeing to allow drilling on the land.

Coupled with an even larger mineral deposit in the Barnett Shale in Texas that's been in production 10 years, the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, Louisiana's Haynesville Shale presents a revitalization of the industry and the opportunity for the nation to wean itself from dependence on foreign oil, Briggs said.

Briggs says that with a more plentiful supply, automobiles could shift to burning natural gas while researchers perfect an alternative fuel.

The most active production areas have been in Caddo, Bienville, Bossier, DeSoto, Red River and Webster parishes, plus adjacent areas in southwest Arkansas and east Texas.

Briggs said 74 wells are working the area now, 50 more than are normally working in all of north Louisiana. "Probably by the end of the year, there will be 100 and by the end of next year, 200. That's an incredible amount of activity."