Though new technology has recently led to a huge increase in the estimates of the amount of natural gas that can be produced economically from U.S. shale deposits, detailed objective analysis of how much gas can actually be produced from these deposits has not yet been done. This grant to the University of Texas at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) will support just such an analysis. BEG will obtain government and company data-some public and some proprietary-on all existing gas wells in the five major shale gas regions of the United States and use these data to perform a well-by-well analysis of production capacity. Although the BEG project will not cover all shale regions, the ones included are expected to yield the lion's share of shale gas over the next 20 years, the time horizon for the study. BEG will also quantify the needs for land and water use to enable various levels of shale gas production to be achieved.