Speaker: Dan Burns, MIT Earth Resources Lab. Natural gas is a growing part of the US energy mix and, because natural gas is also more environmentally friendly, the demand will continue to grow. The US currently has approximately 200 TCF of known conventional reserves, with annual domestic production (2004) of approximately 19 TCF. The US also has an enormous potential source of new natural gas reserves in unconventional reservoirs including tight gas sands, gas shales, ultradeep water reservoirs, and methane hydrates. In total such reserves could provide energy independence for the US if they could be economically produced. Tight gas sand reservoirs are estimated to contain 200-1000 TCF of reserves, depending on the technology available to find and produce them. These reserves, however, are produced through fractures (both natural and induced) and can only be brought on stream through improved technology for the remote sensing and characterization of these fractures. A brief overview of passive and active seismic methods used to image and characterize such fractures will be shown, along with some promising new methods based on scattered wave analysis.