{"id":33066,"date":"2018-04-03T06:46:17","date_gmt":"2018-04-03T11:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33066"},"modified":"2018-04-03T06:46:30","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T11:46:30","slug":"the-problem-with-eia-shale-gas-and-tight-oil-forecasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33066","title":{"rendered":"The Problem with EIA Shale Gas and Tight Oil Forecasts"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"post-image\">\n<div class=\"fimg-wrapper fimg-cl\">\n<div class=\"featured-image\">\n<div class=\"fimg-inner\">\n<div class=\"vm-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"vm-middle\">\n<h3 class=\"post-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2018-04-03\/the-problem-with-eia-shale-gas-and-tight-oil-forecasts\/\">The Problem with EIA Shale Gas and Tight Oil Forecasts<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"backstretch\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/image001-1.jpg\" \/><\/div>\n<div class=\"backstretch\">Each year the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) produces forecasts of U.S. oil and gas production in its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), which is widely viewed as an authoritative assessment of what to expect for future U.S. oil and gas output (the EIA prefers the term \u201cprojection\u201d to \u201cforecast\u201d). The EIA\u2019s reference case is considered as the most likely scenario by industry, policy makers, and the media.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<section class=\"post-content\">Considering that AEO reference case forecasts for shale gas and tight oil production in recent releases are remarkably optimistic when considered at the play-level in terms of well productivity, decline rates and prospective areas, I find this baffling and worrisome. It\u2019s one thing for industry to paint a rosy picture of future production, but something altogether different when a government agency\u2014tasked with providing the American public with objective information\u2014does it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eia.gov\/outlooks\/aeo\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AEO2018<\/a>, for example, projects that shale gas production will be 130% higher in 2050 than in 2016, while tight oil production will grow by 74%, all at relatively low prices. This despite the fact that average production from individual wells falls 70\u201390% in the first three years and entire fields would decline 20-40% a year if new wells weren\u2019t constantly drilled.<\/p>\n<p>I recently assessed the EIA\u2019s AEO2017 forecasts and assumptions for all major shale gas and tight oil plays using a proprietary commercial database of well production data\u2014a database that the EIA itself uses for its own analysis. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.postcarbon.org\/publications\/shale-reality-check\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study<\/a> revealed that the EIA has overestimated the likely future production of shale gas and tight oil for most plays by a wide margin. This is a result of overestimating the size of the prospective area and hence the number of wells that can be drilled, and underestimating future declines in well productivity.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Problem with EIA Shale Gas and Tight Oil Forecasts Each year the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) produces forecasts of U.S. oil and gas production in its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), which is widely viewed as an authoritative assessment of what to expect for future U.S. oil and gas output (the EIA prefers the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2244,267,19651,19650,19503,6665,722,798,827],"class_list":["post-33066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-david-hughes","tag-energy-information-administration","tag-estimations","tag-forecasting","tag-predicting","tag-resilience-org","tag-shale-gas","tag-tight-oil","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33066"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33068,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33066\/revisions\/33068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}