The Utica shale play, which spans 60,000 square miles across Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, will provide America most of its new natural gas, according to a new map published Monday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Production of oil and natural gas from the Utica play has increased since 2011, and companies have drilled more than 1,700 wells as of January 2016, according to the EIA map. The Utica is the center of America’s natural gas boom enabled by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Source: Energy Information Administration
America produced 79 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day in 2015, breaking the previous record by 5 percent, according to an EIA report from earlier this month.
Much of the natural gas boom has been concentrated around the Utica shale. Together, the states around the Utica accounted for 35 percent of total American natural gas production while the rest of the country saw a modest decline. Ohio alone saw its natural gas production grew 41 percent faster last year than it did in 2014.
The development of the Utica shale for natural gas helped America surpass Russia early last year as as the world’s largest and fastest-growing producer natural gas. Today, America’s proven recoverable natural gas reserves are seven times larger than they were in 2014.
Rising U.S. natural gas production has made gas the fuel of choice for America’s power plants, which were transitioning to natural gas before 2015. Natural gas provided more electricity than coal for every month between July and October of last year, according to data released in December by EIA.
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