Interactive Shale Play Map

New Portal Reveals Key Information on Nation’s Shale Gas and Tight Oil Plays

The Bureau of Economic Geology’s Tight Oil Resource Assessment (TORA) consortium has launched a new, interactive online portal into its comprehensive studies and maps of U.S. shale gas and tight oil plays. TORA’s play-wide but granular mapping highlights areas of highest productivity, in-place resources, and technically recoverable resources based on a robust workflow which characterizes the subsurface and incorporates economic analysis, including profitability-driven future activities. A limited version of the portal will be available to the public with TORA member organizations having access to the full content of the basin and play content.

“We’re very excited to have released this new portal to our sponsors and now to release some general interest content into the public domain,” remarked Bureau Director Scott Tinker. “The war in Ukraine is exacerbating the energy crisis in Europe, which is less resilient due to policies forcing production towards expensive and unreliable sources. It’s more important than ever for the U.S. to have a science- and economics-based understanding of its resource endowment and the development potential of its major tight oil and shale gas plays.”

TORA began in 2016 as a research consortium at the Bureau, and consortium partners include corporations and other energy-related organizations. Its research builds on prior groundbreaking Bureau studies of U.S. shale plays funded by the Sloan Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. While TORA’s current focus is on the Permian Basin, its research continues to revisit other key tight oil and shale gas plays in the U.S. TORA’s mission is to provide its stakeholders with reliable, unbiased, and up-to-date projections, models, and insights at the basin scale for the major U.S. unconventional plays.

You can access the public version of the portal at https://maps.beg.utexas.edu/toraportal/

For more information on TORA please contact Emery Goodman at emery.goodman@beg.utexas.edu

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