Eastern Energy Resources Science Center
Eastern Energy Resources Science Center
Interdisciplinary Research on Energy Systems
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The Eastern Energy Resources Science Center (EERSC) addresses national and global energy geoscience issues and conducts interdisciplinary research on energy systems.
What We Provide
The Center provides earth-science information and interpretations essential to building a framework for the identification and assessment of economically stable and environmentally sound resources of petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
What We Address
The Center addresses the economic and environmental effects of energy production and studies unconventional resources including gas hydrates, geothermal resources, uranium, oil shale, and bitumen and heavy oil.
News
New Patent Helps Coalbed Methane Research
Far underground, in a Wyoming well-bore drilled through rock and coal, exciting research is bubbling up. USGS researchers are studying how bacteria and other microbes may play a role in the formation of natural gas from coal, and they’re using one of USGS’ newest patents to do it. This patent is the subsurface environmental sampler, or SES.
Energy Quarterly - Summer 2020
As summer begins, here are a few highlights in our Energy Quarterly Newsletter. This edition is a quick overview of the Energy Resources Program's assessments, research, data, and publications. We also share highlights from our fellow program in the USGS Energy and Minerals Mission Area, the Mineral Resources Program.
USGS Releases A New Assessment Methodology for Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery and Associated Carbon Dioxide Retention
The U.S. Geological Survey has developed a new assessment method to estimate how much oil and gas could be produced by injecting carbon dioxide into petroleum reservoirs. The methodology also includes a way to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide remaining in the reservoir after the production of oil and gas is complete.
Publications
Comparison of machine learning approaches used to identify the drivers of Bakken oil well productivity
Geologists and petroleum engineers have struggled to identify the mechanisms that drive productivity in horizontal hydraulically fractured oil wells. The machine learning algorithms of Random Forest (RF), gradient boosting trees (GBT) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were applied to a dataset containing 7311 horizontal hydraulically...
Attanasi, Emil D.; Freeman, Philip A.; Coburn, Timothy Utica shale play oil and gas brines: Geochemistry and factors influencing wastewater management
The Utica and Marcellus Shale Plays in the Appalachian Basin are the fourth and first largest natural gas producing plays in the United States, respectively. Hydrocarbon production generates large volumes of brine (“produced water”) that must be disposed of, treated, or reused. Though Marcellus brines have been studied extensively, there are few...
Blondes, Madalyn S.; Shelton, Jenna L.; Engle, Mark A; Trembly, Jason; Doolan, Colin A.; Jubb, Aaron M.; Chenault, Jessica; Rowan, Elisabeth L.; Haefner, Ralph J.; Mailot, Brian E. Four-dimensional thermal evolution of the East African Orogen: Accessory phase petrochronology of crustal profiles through the Tanzanian Craton and Mozambique Belt, northeastern Tanzania
U–Pb petrochronology of deep crustal xenoliths and outcrops across northeastern Tanzania track the thermal evolution of the Mozambique Belt and Tanzanian Craton following the Neoproterozoic East African Orogeny (EAO) and subsequent Neogene rifting. At the craton margin, the upper–middle crust record thermal quiescence since the Archean (2.8–2.5...
Apen, Francisco E.; Rudnick, Roberta L.; Cottle, John M.; Kylander-Clark, Andrew R.C.; Blondes, Madalyn S.; Piccoli, Phil; Seward, Gareth