Coalbed methane (CBM) now accounts for nearly 10 percent of the gas production and dry gas reserves in the United States. Over 15,000 coalbed methane wells have been drilled, mostly in the Rocky Mountain region and in Alabama. CBM from Canada, Alaska, and across the lower 48 will vastly increase all these numbers. A huge quantity of this undeveloped gas will come from the many basins in which CBM plays are just emerging throughout North America. Three volumes of Petroleum Frontiers are devoted to these nascent CBM basins; this is the third of these volumes. The first (Petroleum Frontiers, Vol. 18, No. 3) provided an in-depth look at emerging coalbed methane plays in Western Canada, the Green River Basin (Almond coals), the Williston Basin and the potential of CBM production from anthracite. The first volume also included an introduction (Silverman, 2002) to today's key producing basins: the San Juan, Powder River, Uinta, Raton and Black Warrior. A brief summary of CBM resources in these producing areas provided a frame of reference for the emerging basins. That introductory chapter also summarized those types of basins, plays and concepts from which these vast new reserves are likely to be generated. The second volume (Petroleum Frontiers, Vol. 18, No. 4) offered insights into two emerging CBM areas in the Mid-Continent. One is in the Western Interior Basin (Forest City Basin, Cherokee Basin and Northeast Shelf) of Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. The other is in the Illinois Basin. That volume also included two papers on CBM plays in the Southern U.S. One summarized the coalbed methane potential of the Gulf Coast; the other focused on the Olmos coal in the Maverick Basin of South Texas. The reader is referred to these two volumes of Petroleum Frontiers for more information on all those topics.
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