§16522 Low-volume gas reservoir study

Summary

The Secretary must give a grant to an organization of oil and gas producing States that have many marginal wells. That group must run a yearly study of low-volume natural gas reservoirs and work with the State geologist in each State studied. The study must find where marginal wells and low-volume reservoirs are, collect their production data, estimate how much gas can still be produced under different pipeline pressures, find low-pressure gathering lines and pipelines, suggest incentives to keep producing these resources, make maps and materials to help conserve gas, and measure how much gas is wasted by venting or flaring with oil wells. A college with GIS skills must do the data work. If the grantee lacks GIS, it must hire groups that can do advanced image processing, GIS programming, GPS work, combine varied well and pipeline data, build and query GIS databases, make maps and charts, and deliver data in formats such as Internet Map Server, desktop display, and handheld devices. Congress authorized $1,500,000 for fiscal year 2006 and $450,000 for each of fiscal years 2007 through 2010. GIS means geographic information systems technology for managing location-based data.