Why “fracked” shale oil and gas will not save us
Preface. As early as 2011 experts were questioning how large fracked natural gas reserves were.
The latest IEA 2018 report predicts shale oil/gas could start to decline by 2025, and all global oil as soon as 2023.
Shale oil and gas might not even exist without super low interest rates making it quite easy to borrow money, as Bethany McLean writes in her book “Saudi America”. And even though these companies are $300 billion in debt, as long as they can get money, they’ll continue to drill. Some day the dumb middle-class money will be surprised that their 401K and other high interest mutual funds and bonds have crashed after the next economic crash.
***
Cunningham, N. 2019. The Shale Boom Is About To Go Bust. oilprice.com
The shale industry faces an uncertain future as drillers try to outrun the treadmill of precipitous well declines.
For years, companies have deployed an array of drilling techniques to extract more oil and gas out of their wells, steadily intensifying each stage of the operation. Longer laterals, more water, more frac sand, closer spacing of wells – pushing each of these to their limits, for the most part, led to more production. Higher output allowed the industry to outpace the infamous decline rates from shale wells.
In fact, since 2012, average lateral lengths have increased 44 percent to over 7,000 feet and the volume of water used in drilling has surged more than 250 percent, according to a new report for the Post Carbon Institute. Taken together, longer laterals and more prodigious use of water and sand means that a well drilled in 2018 can reach 2.6 times as much reservoir rock as a well drilled in 2012, the report says.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
