Frackin’ the Shale in Tuscaloosa’—Is TMS the Next Bakken?
With the crude to natural gas price ratio (crude in $/Bbl divided by gas in $/MMbtu) continuing in historically high territory many energy companies are looking for more opportunities to shift from producing cheap gas to producing premium-price oil. For that reason, one tight-oil play long in the background—the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) in central Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi—is attracting new attention; particularly from drillers who think they’ve figured out how to deal with TMS’s challenging characteristics. But is TMS all its fracked up to be? Today we begin a new series on TMS with a primer on this 6.6 million-acre shale play that’s said to have seven billion barrels of oil in place deep below ground but only a stone’s throw from the pipeline networks and refineries of the Gulf Coast.
