On December 3, 2014, Nature published “Natural Gas: The Fracking Fallacy”, which suggested that the forecasts of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) for four major U.S. shale gas plays were wildly optimistic, based on a comparison to forecasts for the same plays by the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology (UT/BEG). This was followed by a formal denunciation of the article both by the EIA and UT/BEG, despite the fact that the substance of the article was correct. Arthur Berman provided an excellent overview of the merits—or in this case the lack thereof—of the attack by both of these agencies on what is essentially the reality behind the shale revolution.
The Nature piece steered clear of any discussion of my recent Drilling Deeper report (published by Post Carbon Institute), which looked at twelve major shale gas and tight oil plays accounting for most of U.S. shale production, and which also came to the conclusion that the EIA’s projections were extremely optimistic. Naturefocused instead on the four plays described in two published and two unpublished studies by UT/BEG. TheNature article sparked a lot of media attention, which prompted the EIA and UT/BEG to issue rebuttals.
The argument of the EIA and UT/BEG that their projections of shale gas production from the plays mentioned in the Nature article are fundamentally similar is untrue, given the publicly available data. The implications of the EIA being wrong on its projections of cheap and abundant gas for decades are considerable, given that investment decisions are now being made based on these projections— including construction of infrastructure for LNG exports, gas-fired generation and even crude oil exports. Hence it is worthwhile to examine the EIA’s optimistic projections in more detail in light of the projections available from UT/BEG and the Drilling Deeperreport (DD).
