Tight Gas

Imagine two buckets of sand, one coarse and loosely packed so water drains through instantly, the other extremely fine and compacted so water barely seeps through at all. Tight gas sits in rock that behaves like the second bucket, gas is genuinely present, but the rock's low permeability means it will not flow to a well easily using conventional drilling alone.

Extracting tight gas usually requires the same kind of hydraulic fracturing used for shale gas, artificially creating pathways in the rock for the gas to escape through. It is grouped alongside shale gas and coal bed methane in the broader category the industry calls unconventional gas, all three requiring meaningfully different, more expensive techniques than a standard conventional gas well.

India has identified pockets of tight gas potential in some of the same basins explored for shale, though like shale gas, actual commercial development remains limited relative to the resource base that has been mapped.