[cripplecreek]

I live in Michigan and we have all the heat and electricity we need right under my feet. Too bad the feds and state have made it virtually untouchable. Fred Upton was one of the idiots who voted for the great lakes directional drilling ban.

[factoryrat]

Yep, sitting on a lot of energy we can’t even touch. There’s still some operating oil wells up here in the thumb of MI, but operating for how long is anybody’s guess. Prohibiting drilling here is just plain ridiculous.

[lentulusgracchus]

The reason there are no shale plays indicated SE of the Appalachian front in SE US is that that terrane is actually a left-behind piece of the African shelf that was sutured to the North American plate during the Carboniferous (Mississippian and Pennsylvanian) Hercynian Orogeny and suturing event that saw all the continents joined into one supercontinent, Pangaea.

When Pangaea rifted beginning in the Triassic (the Triassic exposures in the Hudson River bluffs near New York City are part of this system), the spreading center was located to the east, and the rift developed to the east over the spreading center, of the old suture. Therefore, most of Georgia used to be part of the Moroccan continental shelf.

There are rifted Paleozoic basins to the east and south of the Hercynian suture (called the Broward Fault Zone, in Georgia and North Carolina, which is located underneath the Chattahoochee River where it flows NE-SW through suburban Atlanta, at the foot of Vinings Mountain). These wrench-fold basins formed during the convergence, suturing and deformation of the African shelf of the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Periods.

The halves of the basins that remained with Africa produce hydrocarbons (in Algeria, e.g.), but are "immature" in terms of their kerogen-maturation histories.

Close to the suture, heat flow from the convergence cycle has "fried" the sedimentary column (which is largely low-grade metamorphics now in the Piedmont: which is why the Piedmont is the Piedmont, and the Fall Line exists at the boundary of the Paleozoic metasediments and the unconsolidated Cretaceous and Tertiary sediments of the Atlantic Coastal Plain).

In between Africa and the Piedmont there is a broad belt of thermally mature, rifted half-basins which have been outlined structurally by interrupted exploration in the 70's but are still largely unexplored because of political interference (NIMBY politics). The SE Georgia Embayment is one of these old wrench-folded basins, and it lies just offshore Savannah, Georgia, and a historically underserved (and overpriced) natural-gas market whose utilities continue to burn coal as a result.

Irrespective of shale-trend hydrocarbon exploration, the basins (and their shales) of the Atlantic margin are a very fat exploration target that has been "on the shelf" politically and underexplored for 50 years.