The drop in commodity prices may have turned emerging plays into submerging plays, but that’s not to say the well has run dry when it comes to new frontiers.

Attendees at Hart Energy’s DUG East Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh learned of a nascent, Haynesville-sized gas play in the Appalachian Basin when West Virginia-based consulting geologist Gregory Wrightstone outlined nearly 87 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) in recoverable potential for the Upper Devonian Burket-Geneseo.

The play resides in a 13-million-acre arc from West Virginia to northeast Pennsylvania. Wrightstone divides the play into two core areas with the first located at the junction of the West Virginia panhandle and southwestern Pennsylvania, and a second core in Tioga and Lycoming counties in northeastern Pennyslvania.

The geologist classified both Burket sweet spots as potential supergiant gas fields, or fields that hold more than 30 Tcf of recoverable resource. The Burket is separated from the underlying Marcellus by the Tully Limestone and ranges in thickness from 10 feet of core facies in the southwest to more than 100 feet in northeastern Pennsylvania. Stratigraphically, the Burket lies about 100 feet above the top of the Marcellus in West Virginia, but more than 800 feet above the Marcellus in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Wrightstone estimates recoverable reserves in the southwest core at 36 Tcf, or a Barnett Shale equivalent, with another 50 Tcf recoverable in northeast Pennsylvania, or two-thirds the Haynesville Shale. The play features a thermal maturity and petro-physical profile similar to the Marcellus.

To date, the industry has completed 85 horizontal wells in the Burket. Previously, operators drilled about 100 uneconomic vertical wells. Most wells are concentrated in Washington and Greene counties in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, and in Wetzel County, West Virginia.

Wells in northern Pennsylvania are half as productive as Marcellus wells over a 180-day period. In the southwestern core, productivity per well is higher, but wells may be fracking down into the Marcellus.

The formation drew 173 permits in 2014, more than double the pace in 2013. Active operators in the play include EQT Corp., which has drilled 60 horizontal Burket wells. According to Wrightstone, the company plans to drill another 40 this year. Consol Energy is also testing the Burket. Other operators active in the play include Rex Energy Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell, while operators with acreage prospective for the Burket include Range Resources Corp., Rice Energy Inc. and Antero Resources Corp.

As is characteristic of the unconventional era, the single best way to establish a position in a new resource play is to wake up one morning to discover it has been under your legacy acreage all along.

Completion techniques mirror the Marcellus—all slickwater, all the time—with higher proppant loading, more water and reduced cluster spacing. Those techniques have led to bigger flows, expanded reserves and entail higher initial flow rates in the Marcellus, and are expected to do the same in the Burket.

In fact, productivity out of the first 85 horizontal Burket wells is not much different than productivity out of the first 85 Marcellus and Utica wells. In the grand spectrum of unconventional development, operators can typically delineate a resource in the first 100 wells but require another 500 to 1,000 to optimize the potential.

The best development scenario in the southern Burket calls for pad-drilled wells as part of a stacked and staggered pattern interlaced with the underlying Marcellus.

When it comes to stacked plays, Appalachia features a similar profile to Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin and the venerable Permian Basin. In southwestern Appalachia, the current stacked lineup includes the deep dry gas Utica, the over-pressured liquids-rich Marcellus, and what previously has been called the Upper Devonian, but is basically the Burket, along with the overlying Rhinestreet and Middlesex shales. Of the Upper Devonian group, the Burket is far and away the more attractive target.

Does North America need another supergiant gas resource? Over the next half decade, probably not. The significance of the Burket is not the resource size; rather, it is the role the Burket will play in expanding the potential of the world-class Marcellus/ Utica natural gas province. The implications are not so much about what happens in 2016; rather, they are about how the Burket will extend and expand the Appalachian gas play over a couple of decades.

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