MAPPING AND RESERVOIR CHARACTERIZATION OF GEOLOGIC INTERVALS FOR NGL STORAGE APPLICATIONS

Natural gas liquids (NGLs) produced from the Utica and Marcellus shales in the tri-state region of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia provide an opportunity to support a petrochemical industry supplying polypropylene feedstock for industrial applications. Strategically, this area is within 500 miles of major plastics manufacturing, can spur the re-development of brownfields and is not subject to the extreme weather events of the Gulf Coast. Understanding this potential, the governors of Pennsylvania and West Virginia and the Lt. governor of Ohio signed a regional cooperation agreement in 2015, promoting this cross-border economic opportunity to build a global petrochemical hub. They tasked the Appalachian Oil and Natural Gas Research Consortium (funded through the Benedum Foundation and comprised of the geological surveys of the three states, West Virginia University and 13 industry partners) to evaluate storage potential in subsurface stratigraphic units in a fifty-county Area of Interest (AOI) proximal to proposed NGL pipeline infrastructure along Ohio and Kanawha rivers.

Survey geologists used publicly available data to complete a desktop assessment of three types of storage containers: mined-rock caverns in the mudstone facies of the Greenbrier Limestone, salt caverns in the F4 Salina where the clean salt is ≥100 feet thick and depleted siliciclastic gas reservoirs. Stratigraphic correlations of key units; measured depth and structure maps; Greenbrier facies and net clean F4 Salina Salt thickness maps; and the structure and depositional environment of depleted Newburg sandstone reservoirs provide detailed examples of the geological reservoir characterization efforts to assess the viability of NGL storage containers for this study.