Publications

This volume is the fifth in a series of reports by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on the assessment of the quantity and quality of the nation’s coal deposits that potentially could be mined during the next few decades. For eight years (1995-2003), geologic, geochemical, and resource information was collected and compiled for the five major coal-producing regions of the United States...

The production of natural gas from shales continues to increase in North America, and shale gas exploration is on the rise in other parts of the world since the previous report by this committee was published by American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Energy Minerals Division (2009). For the United States, the volume of proved reserves of natural gas increased 11% from 2008 to 2009...

A seismic refraction line crossing the Lincoln Sea was acquired in 2006. It proves the existence of a deep sedimentary basin underlying the Lincoln Sea. This basin appears to be comparable in width and depth to the Sverdrup Basin of the Canadian Arctic Islands. The stratigraphy of the Lincoln Sea Basin is modelled in analogy to the Sverdrup Basin and the Central Spitsbergen Basin, two...

The current paper complements the Moridis et al. (2009) review of the status of the effort toward commercial gas production from hydrates. We aim to describe the concept of the gas-hydrate (GH) petroleum system; to discuss advances, requirements, and suggested practices in GH prospecting and GH deposit characterization; and to review the associated technical, economic, and environmental...

This review of the lignite resources of Arkansas is a part of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Coal Resource Assessment (NCRA) of the Gulf Coastal Plain Coal Province, which also includes coal-bearing areas in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky (see Ruppert et al., 2002; Dennen, 2009; and other chapters of this publication). Lignite...

The Navajo Nation is an ecologically sensitive semi-arid to arid section of the southern Colorado Plateau. In this remote part of the United States, located at the Four Corners (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah), traditional people live a subsistence lifestyle that is inextricably tied to, and dependent upon, landscape conditions and water supplies. Soft bedrock lithologies and...

The Wilcox Group (Paleocene to Eocene) of the Sabine uplift, a structural arch in northeastern Texas and northwestern Louisiana (Figure 1), has lignite zones that approach subbituminous rank (see Chapter 4, this publication). These coals are among the highest quality resources known within the Gulf Coastal Plain because of their low ash yield and sulfur content. The surface expression of...

Two bituminous coal zones, the San Pedro and the Santo Tomas, in the middle Eocene Claiborne Group of Webb County, south Texas (Figure 1), are among the coal resources that are not evaluated quantitatively as part of the current Gulf Coastal Plain coal resource assessment. Coal beds within these zones were mined by underground methods northwest of Laredo until 1939 and have been...

Recent geologic mapping in the northern San Francisco Bay region (California, USA) supported by radiometric dating and tephrochronologic correlations, provides insights into the framework geology, stratigraphy, tectonic evolution, and geologic history of this part of the San Andreas transform plate boundary. There are 25 new and existing radiometric dates that define three temporally...

Geological features of NE Greenland suggest large petroleum potential, as well as high uncertainty and risk. The area was the prototype for development of methodology used in the US Geological Survey (USGS) Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal (CARA), and was the first area evaluated. In collaboration with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), eight ‘assessment units’ (AU)...

Stratigraphic descriptions and radiocarbon data from eleven field locations are presented in this paper to establish a chronostratigraphic framework for offshore to nearshore deposits of Lake Bonneville. Based on key marker beds and geomorphic position, the deposits are interpreted to have accumulated during the period from the late transgressive phase, through the overflowing phase...

Coal deposits in the Wilcox Group of central Texas have been regarded as the richest coal resources in the Gulf Coastal Plain. Although minable coal beds appear to be less numerous and generally higher in sulfur content (1 percent average, as-received basis; table 1) than Wilcox coal deposits in the Northeast Texas and Louisiana Sabine assessment areas (0.5 and 0.6 percent sulfur...