Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, enegy, frack, fracking, IEA, oil journalism, oil production, oil shale, oil supply, Peak Demand, peak oil, shale oil, tight oil, Tom Gjelten
As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports:
“Petroleum engineers have always known about the untapped underground oil in the United States, but it was unreachable, trapped in tight shale rock. Then the engineers figured out how to crack the rock. Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — got that ‘tight oil’ finally flowing in places like North Dakota.”
via Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market : The Two-Way : NPR.
Wrong, Tom. The tight oil has been ‘reachable’ for several decades, it was just such an expensive process that it made no sense to do it when oil was cheap — a money-losing proposition. Now, all the cheap oil is gone, and out comes the ‘unconventional’ oil.
Gjelten also said that the decline in oil consumption in the US was due to efficiency (check the VMT chart Tom). There was no mention of depletion of existing fields, or the striking decline rate of fracked shale wells. And he reported that cheaper oil is just over the horizon.
Would it hurt Mr. Gjelten to do just a tiny bit of research on the topic of his reports so he doesn’t sound like a complete idiot?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, Bakken Shale, crude oil, energy, horizontal drilling, James Hamilton, Jeffrey Brown, marginal costs of production, natural gas liquids, Niobrara, oil price, oil shale, peak oil, shale oil, shale plays, tight gas, tight oil, tight oil formations, unconventional oil, westtexas
Throwing a little cold water on some recent, loudly reported unscientific predictions. When you read Hamilton, always be sure to read the comments by Jeffrey Brown for an important Big Picture view.
In addition to the uncertainties noted above about extrapolating historical production rates, the rate at which production declines from a given well over time is another big unknown. Another key point to recognize is the added cost of extracting oil from tight formations. West Texas Intermediate is currently around $85/barrel. With the huge discount for Canadian and north-central U.S. producers, that means that producers of North Dakota sweet are only offered $61 a barrel. Tight oil is not going to be the reason that we return to an era of cheap oil, for the simple reason that if oil again fell below $50/barrel, it wouldn’t be profitable to produce with these methods. Nor is tight oil likely to get the U.S. back to the levels of field production that we saw in 1970. But tight oil will likely provide a source of significant new production over the next decade as long as the price does not fall too much.
via Econbrowser: Shale oil and tight oil.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Estonia, kerogen, minimal surface disturbance, oil shale, open pit mining
These are the same people who claim “minimal surface disturbance.”
From Google Earth.
And here’s one of those areas from about 100,000 feet:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American Petroleum Institute, kerogen, oil shale, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell
Hey, with “the right policies,” we can make this resource available to Royal Dutch Shell. “Right policies” would include taxpayer subsidies and environmental de-regulation. Then they can sell 100k bpd or so. Never mind that it could very well take over 100k bpd equivalent to make 100k bpd of oil out of Colorado kerogen. And there is no water available to do anything, let alone process “oil shale.” But with the “right policies” … anything is possible.
Note — “oil shale” is not “shale oil.” “Oil shale” is not oil and usually not shale either.
Filed under: maps, Uncategorized | Tags: Eagle Ford shale, frac, oil, oil shale, shale gas, shale oil, Texas, tight gas, tight oil, tracking, water
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204528204577009930222847246.html
Piece in WSJ on oil versus water in Texas. The inconvenient reality of hydro-fracking. The article itself claims 6 million gallons needed for each Frac in the Eagle Ford. (The article is behind the paywall.)
