{"id":42522,"date":"2019-01-10T07:53:52","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T12:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42522"},"modified":"2019-01-31T22:04:58","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T03:04:58","slug":"fracked-shale-oil-wells-drying-up-faster-than-predicted-wall-street-journal-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42522","title":{"rendered":"Fracked Shale Oil Wells Drying Up Faster than Predicted, Wall Street Journal Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fracked Shale Oil Wells Drying Up Faster than Predicted, Wall Street Journal Finds<\/a><\/h3>\n
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In 2015, Pioneer Natural Resources filed a report with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the shale drilling and fracking company said that it was \u201cdrilling the most productive wells in the Eagle Ford Shale\u201d in Texas.<\/p>\n

That made the company a major player in what local trade papers were calling<\/a> \u201carguably the largest single economic event in Texas history,\u201d as drillers pumped more than a billion barrels of fossil fuels from the Eagle Ford.<\/p>\n

Its Eagle Ford wells, Pioneer\u2019s filing<\/a> said, were massive finds, with each well able to deliver an average of roughly 1.3 million barrels of oil and other fossil fuels over their lifetimes.<\/p>\n

Three years later, The Wall Street Journal checked the numbers<\/a>, investigating how those massive wells are turning out for Pioneer.<\/p>\n

Turns out, not so well. And Pioneer is not alone.<\/p>\n

Those 1.3 million-barrel wells, the Journal reported, \u201cnow appear to be on a pace to produce about 482,000 barrels\u201d apiece \u2014 a little over a third of what Pioneer told investors they could deliver.<\/p>\n

In Texas\u2019 famed Permian Basin, now the nation\u2019s most productive shale oil field, where Pioneer predicted 960,000 barrels from each of its shale wells in 2015, the Journal concluded that those \u201cwells are now on track to produce about 720,000 barrels\u201d each.<\/p>\n

Not only are the wells already drying up at a much faster rate than the company predicted, according to the Journal\u2019s investigative report, but Pioneer\u2019s projections require oil to flow for at least 50 years after the well was drilled and fracked \u2014 a projection experts told the Journal would be \u201cextremely optimistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fracking every one of those wells required a vast amount of chemicals, sand, and water. In Karnes County, Texas, one of the two Eagle Ford counties where Pioneer concentrated its drilling in 2015, the average round of fracking that year drank up<\/a>roughly 143,000 barrels of water per well.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fracked Shale Oil Wells Drying Up Faster than Predicted, Wall Street Journal Finds In 2015, Pioneer Natural Resources filed a report with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the shale drilling and fracking company said that it was \u201cdrilling the most productive wells in the Eagle Ford Shale\u201d in Texas. That made the company […]<\/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":[5317,23829,588,723,11167,827,846,861],"class_list":["post-42522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-desmog-blog","tag-fracked-shale-oil-wells","tag-oil","tag-shale-oil","tag-sharon-kelly","tag-united-states","tag-us-shale-oil","tag-wall-street-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42522","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=42522"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43395,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42522\/revisions\/43395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}