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Peak of Gas Production in the Barnett Shale

August 18, 2015

Peak of Gas Production in the Barnett Shale

An ocean of ink has already been spilled on pros and cons of using Hubbert curves to model production from a large collection of wells in one or many reservoirs.  In 2010, I published together with my last graduate student in Berkeley, Dr. Greg Croft, a highly cited paperon this subject. I have also commented multiple times in this blog on the different aspects of the Hubbert curve analysis, its limitations, and predictive power.

Since I cannot out-talk or out-convince the numerous critics of this type of analysis, let me give you a simple example of its robustness. This particular story is as follows.  At the end of the year 2010, Greg Fenves, at that time Dean of UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering in Austin, asked me to make a presentation to the School’s Engineering Advisory Board (EAB).  Using the results of our recent paper with Greg Croft, I chose to speak about my new work on unconventional resources in the U.S.  On April 09, 2011, I made the presentation, which was then internally published by the Cockrell School.

The first two Barnett shale plots shown below were based on the Texas Railroad Commission data through October 2010. In the presentation, I called these plots the “high production scenario.”  The Hubbert curve with which I matched the production data ending in October 2010, went right between the two local peaks of the data.  Of course there was an element of luck, helped by two decades of my experience as a reservoir engineer.  Such experience or – for that matter – any other knowledge of reservoir engineering is absent among the economists, political scientists and journalists, who are paid to criticize this type of work.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
 

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