UNCONVENTIONAL ONSHORE PROGRAM: Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America
Objectives for the Unconventional Resources program element have been developed with input
from the Consortiums unconventional onshore Program Advisory Committee (PAC). This input
has been combined with information gathered during a number of relatively recent efforts to
identify and prioritize the technology challenges to development of unconventional resources.
These efforts include: 1) a series of five workshops held in various producing basins by RPSEA
and New Mexico Tech during 2003, 2) workshops carried out as part of the National Petroleum
Council (NPC) 2003 Natural Gas Study, 3) a series of DOE-sponsored unconventional gas
technology road-mapping workshops held during 2005, 4) eleven forums held by RPSEA during
late 2006 and early 2007, and 5) information developed for the 2007 NPC Global Oil and Gas
Study entitled: Facing the Hard Truths About Energy. All of these inputs were combined to arrive
at the prioritized list of technology challenges that underlie both the objectives of this program
and the list of solicitation topics found in the implementation plan.
The objectives are defined in terms of the resource (shales, coal, tight sands), and the level of
field development category (existing, emerging and frontier). All three resources are important
but gas shales, the most difficult and least developed, was identified during this process as the top
priority. It was the consensus of the advisory groups that gas shales promised the greatest
potential return on investment in terms of reserve additions.
