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Is U.S. Shale Oil & Gas Production Peaking? Part I: Gas Production

Part I of this post shows my calculations of ultimate gas recovery from the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville and Marcellus shales.  They might deliver 6-7 years of natural gas consumption in the U.S. in 2015, or might deliver only 3 years worth of U.S. gas consumption.  In Part II, I will show my calculations of ultimate recovery of oil and gas in the Eagle Ford and Bakken shales that ultimately might deliver 6-12 months of additional gas consumption.  I will also discuss the physical reasons for the negative impact oil production from these two shales has had on global oil prices.

As Asjylyn Loder and others at Bloomberg have noted, another 19 billion dollars of debt of shale oil and gas producers is going into default as of the second week of March, 2016:
Since the start of 2015, 48 oil and gas producers have gone bankrupt owing more than $17 billion, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. Fitch Ratings Ltd. predicts $70 billion of energy, metal and mining defaults this year, and…

The Global Oil Peak or a Plateau?

I am about to cover a very serious subject, so please forgive my somewhat formal and unduly precise language.  Since I am talking here about the future of our crude oil-powered civilization, I do not feel too guilty. Besides, you can always stop reading...

The six categories of liquid and solid hydrocarbons in Figure 1 are lumped together into three different combinations in the reports of global liquid fuel production maintained by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

These combinations are:
Natural gas plant liquids (NGPLs). NGPLs are those hydrocarbons in natural gas that are separated as liquids at natural gas processing plants, fractionating and cycling plants, and in some instances, field facilities. Lease condensate is excluded. Products obtained include liquefied petroleum gases (ethane, propane, and butanes), pentanes plus, and isopentane. Lease condensate and crude oil. Lease condensate is a mixture consisting primarily of hydrocarbons heavier than pentanes that is re…

Dot-con ventures

Our society, like a novel lunatic, needs bad ideas, so that our collective craziness can have shape and direction.  Biofuels are one of such brazenly bad ideas that have crystallized a bunch of lunatic government policies and attracted other, completely unrelated lunatics. All these lunatics became friends of biofuels.

"Ideas on Earth," observed Kilgore Trout, "were badges of friendship or enmity.  Their content did not matter.  Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness.  Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity." 

And so it goes.

Unfortunately, there were more bad news for the imaginary "advanced biofuels."  These no doubt miraculous, but yet undiscovered substances seem to fall into the domain of dot-con ventures sponsored by the fabulously well-to-do ventriloquists. 

[Ventriloquy, is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) manipulates his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is coming f…