Jonah Field
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Jonah Field is a large natural gas field in Sublette County, Wyoming, in the United States. The field is approximately 32 miles south of Pinedale in southwestern Wyoming, and is estimated to contain 10.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the field has a productive area of 21,000 acres.
Jonah Field was discovered by geologist Ed Warner working with McMurry Oil. The field proved viable after the drilling of the McMurry Oil Company Jonah-Federal #1-5 in January, 1993 where McMurry placed their operations office.
The major gas companies currently developing the field are the EnCana Corporation and BP. Other active gas companies involved in the Jonah Field include Ultra Petroleum and Yates Petroleum.
The Jonah Field is known for being one of the largest on-shore natural gas discoveries in the USA in the early 1990's. The startling fact is that Jonah has a surface area of approximately one township yet it contains in excess of 10 TCF of gas. In comparison, the Hugoton Field covers most of the southwest portion of Kansas, a 14 county area, yet it contained only about three times the volume of gas in Jonah.
The principal technical challenge in Jonah is identification and stimulation of productive intervals in a 3,000' to 3,500' section of stacked lenticualr fluvial sand/silt/shale sequences which comprise the Upper Mesaverde, Lance, and Unamed Tertiary formations. Hydraulic fracturing is used to open (stimulate) the tight sand formations that exist more than a mile and a half underground, which allows gas to be recovered at economic rates.
The presence of natural gas in and around Sublette County was known for years, but it was not deemed practical to extract. El Paso Natural Gas Company in the 1970s, in cooperation with Federal Government of the United States and the Atomic Energy Commission, proposed a project called Wagon Wheel Nuclear Stimulation Project, which was an attempt to detonate 5 small nuclear explosions to fracture the sands and enable natural-gas production. The project was abandoned and the Jonah Field and surrounding areas, including the Pinedale Anticline, were left undeveloped for years.
Other large natural gas fields in and around Sublette Country, Wyoming include the Pinedale Anticline, the Wamsutter gas field and several sour gas H2S fields operated by Exxon.
