Summary: Over the last 20 years, oil and gas production from shale reservoirs has grown from a small fraction to more than half of total U.S. hydrocarbon production. This presentation is an attempt to give a high-level overview of the development and current state of shale oil and gas in the United States and Texas. A brief history of hydrocarbon production from shale in the U.S. is given, which shows that the “shale revolution” was the product of more than two decades of experimentation and technology development, rather than an overnight success. A review of the basin development and geologic characteristics of major shale plays highlights that many of these “different” reservoirs were deposited in similar conditions and are sometimes stratigraphically equivalent. We end with a discussion of shale resource base and production trends.

Biography: Tim McMahon is the Project Manager for the Tight Oil Resource Assessment (TORA) consortium at the Bureau of Economic Geology. Prior to joining the BEG in July 2022, Tim spent more than 25 years as a geologist in the oil and gas industry, including 10 years with ConocoPhillips, mostly as an exploration geoscientist. He has worked on projects around the world, and lived in Canada, Norway, and Malaysia. After leaving ConocoPhillips, he founded Cutlass Exploration where he participated in onshore US exploration wells and provided geoscience consulting around play-based exploration, resource assessment and application of machine learning to geological problems. He received a B.A. in Geology from Rutgers, an M.S. in Geology from NMSU, and a PhD from UT-Austin.