NORWICH – Production levels for the last five horizontal wells drilled into the Herkimer averaged 1 million cubic feet a day, according to Norse Energy’s fourth quarter report, and reserves are estimated at 1.2 billion cubic feet of gas per well.

Using a standard calculator available on the Internet and a $5 per thousand cubic foot price for the gas, each well could net Norse approximately $18 million over its productive lifetime (about 20 years).

Likewise, landowners in the spacing unit would share a little less than 12.5 percent of the money, or approximately $2 million over the same time period. And because analysts are predicting that the price of natural gas could nearly double over the next several years, the returns would also double.

“The money is huge and the volumes of the reserves are huge,” said Steven Palmatier, a member of the Chenango County Gas Committee and Commerce Chenango Governmental Affairs Committee. “It is stunning to me from the standpoint of the estimates on the Herkimer, the reserves that each unit holds.”

Norse Energy’s area of interest includes significant holdings in all of Chenango County and portions of Otsego, Broome and Madison. It has seismically identified 250 wells in the Herkimer.

Those closely following the company’s reports, also known as Nornew, Inc., are quick to point out that the calculations above are for just one subsurface layer. Many landowners in the region could be sitting on as many as five layers of natural gas producing sandstones and shales: the Marcellus, the Utica, the Herkimer, the Oneida and the Vernon.

Norse has leases on 130,000 acres in the Marcellus and Utica shales, for example, and identifies 800 well locations in the Marcellus and 800 in the Utica. Production reserve estimates are exponentially higher in those formations.