Art Berman: Exposing The False Promise Of Shale Oil
Because the US is pinning huge hopes on its shale oil “revolution”, so much depends on that story being right. Here’s the narrative right now:
- The US, is the new Saudi Arabia
- It’s the swing producer when it comes to influencing the price of oil
- The US will be able to increase oil production for decades to come
- New technology is unlocking more oil shale supply all the time
But what if there’s evidence that runs counter to all of that?
We’re going to be taking a little victory lap on this week’s podcast because The Wall Street Journal has finally admitted that shale oil wells are not producing as much as the companies operating them touted they would produce — which is what we’ve been saying for years here at PeakProsperity.com, largely because we closely follow Art’s work:
The Wall Street Journal did some research and they got the general point that the wells are not as good as advertised.
But what they missed is just how much farther off many of these reserves are than even the discounted reserves that they’ve reported.
Bottom line: if the understatement is only 10%, that’s a rounding error and it’s not that much of an issue to the average person. But I’ve been trying for a decade to get the number that I independently develop to get anywhere close to the published numbers. In most cases, I can only get near 60% or 70% of them. So, the gap, I think is much more substantial.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
