§16522 Low-volume Gas Reservoir Study

Summary

The Secretary must give a grant to a group of oil- and gas-producing States that have many small or marginal wells so they can do an annual study of low-volume natural gas reservoirs. The group must work with each State’s geologist. The study must find and map marginal wells and low-pressure gas fields, collect production data, estimate how much gas can still be produced at different pipeline pressures, locate low-pressure gathering lines and pipelines, suggest incentives to keep these resources working, create maps and materials for States, and measure gas lost by venting or flaring. A college or university with GIS must do the data work. If the group has no GIS, it must hire experts who can do advanced image processing and GPS, combine different well and pipeline data, build and query GIS databases, write custom programs, make maps and charts, and deliver data in web and handheld formats. 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 organizing location-based data.