This chart shows the growth and decline of the nine largest US shale plays over the past three years:
Out of nine fields, only two have shown production growth since 2020. The rest are either flat or down.
This is one of the drawbacks of shale.¹ The development of fracking has allowed us to open up about 8 million barrels per day of crude oil from shale rock in the US, but individual drilling sites have short lifespans. Overall production is still increasing thanks to two medium-size fields that have continued to grow, but that's it. Our best guess is that shale will top out at 8-10 million barrels per day as new drills are installed while old ones start to play out after they've produced for about five years.
¹Others: it's relatively expensive to produce and is difficult to supply profitably when world prices are lower than about $80 per barrel; it requires lots of possibly poisonous slurry, which production companies treat as "trade secrets" and therefore refuse to break down into components for public review; and it releases a lot of methane into the atmosphere thanks to inadequate seals.
“Its discovery has added about 8 billion barrels per day”. Spell check doesn’’t pick that up.
I'm assuming Mr D has already made his correction, because "Its discovery" is correct.
I believe Cycledoc was referring to the units. The United States does not extract billions of barrels of oil a day. It extracts millions: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=M
Oh! Thanks! I went for the easy target, without fully analyzing the comment. My bad. Sorry, Cycledoc!
So, Kevin. In the name of demand reduction, is your car at least a hybrid? Your heating via heat pump? Your cooking via electricity?
I have no idea about Kevin's specifics, but the things you cite are all trending sharply upward, at least in blue states.
Per a friend in the industry, the global 'undiscovered' reserves of shale are vast. For example, because of various constraints (access, cost, legal and regulatory etc) very little of Europe, Africa or Asia has been explored for shale.
Perhaps, for global warming reasons, most of the global shale gas will stay in the ground: however, the idea that we are near peak supply, is likely very wrong.
It is as much economics as much as the constraints you mention. Full cycle economics of shale gas in the US have been quite poor and very dependenton price. Given the possibility of reduced demand due to climate change regulation, it is very uncertian if much of the remaining shale gas resource (reserves only refer to developed resources i.e. already drilled and tied into a pipeline system) I worked in the petroleum industry for 40 plus years and blaming regulations and legal constraints for delayed development was a constant excuse.
The total physical supply irrespective of cost and/or accessability has never been and will never be a meaningful statistic. Cost and the ability to recover the molecules are pretty important.
Supply that isnt actually available isn't actually supply.
Eastern europe went all in on shale. No one was able to do it profitably. Really, outside of the permian. no one is able to to make it make economic sense in the US.
I assume this is about shale oil. I have no idea what the shale business is all about.
It's oil fields in shale rock. The drilling is usually done by rock fracturing techniques, popularly called "fracking".
It's called tight oil. shale oil is something completely different and no one has found a way to make that play make sense.
Speaking of climate change and marginal extraction of oil, the Canadian wildfires in the midsection of Saskatchewan and creeping up towards the Northern Territories, continues.