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?
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