Western gas sands research is conducted by the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Morgantown Energy Technology Center to encourage the development of very low-permeability lenticular gas sands in the western US. This research is an integral part of DOE's Unconventional Gas Recovery Program, which is a multi-disciplinary effort to develop the technology for producing natural gas from resources that have been classified as unconventional because of unique geologies and production mechanisms. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate to private industry the feasibility of economically producing natural gas from these low-permeability reservoirs. The reservoirs, which are found within a resource area that covers 311,000 square miles, contain an estimated 466 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas-in-place. Two broad research goals have been defined: (1) to reduce the uncertainty of the reservoir production potential, and (2) to improve the extraction technology. These goals are being pursued by conducting research and encouraging industrial efforts to develop the necessary technology. The focus of the research for the last several years has been on improving diagnostic instrumentation for reservoir and stimulation performance evaluation, geophysical and engineering interpretation, and stimulation techniques. Integrated geologic studies of three depositional basins that contain tight lenticular sandstone units have also been pursued as part of this new effort. These lenticular sands were selected by DOE as priority research targets because of the size of the resource potential and the many technical and economic questions blocking industry development. 9 refs., 10 figs., 3 tabs.