LifeItself

I've been receiving recurring requests for the links to our publications on shales.  Thus, I have decided to put our shale story together, and update it in the future as the new papers are published. So far, this story consists of 29 papers and one patent published, and eight papers are pending.  Our goal is to describe the well-by-well histories and possible futures of all major US shale plays, starting from the earliest one, the Barnett. To achieve this goal, we have been using a physics-based scaling of individual well production and the generalized extreme value (GEV) statistics for spatio-temporal cohorts of wells.   As an aside, out of 15 or so, only  three of our paper submissions to the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) conferences have been accepted since 2017, and we have given up on the SPE, of which I am a Distinguished Member with 38 years in the Society under my belt.  It is quite sad for me personally, but SPE has been in disarray for sev...

This blog is a companion to " The Discrete Charm of Living at the Peak. " If you follow national media, you are probably convinced by now that in 10-15 years from today, the United States will be producing enough oil to become independent of foreign oil suppliers.  (In most predictions of energy independence, Canada and Mexico are treated as the almost domestic oil suppliers.) So can the United States of America be dependent only on domestic crude oil production and imports from Canada augmented by Mexico? This scenario is not as nonsensical as it may sound, if (1) the United States continues to destroy demand for petroleum just as it has in the last four years ; and (2) crude oil imports from Canada increase dramatically, because Mexico will not be able to export much crude oil in 5-10 years from now.  Since 2008, the U.S. has destroyed demand for 2 million barrels of crude oil per day, which translates into an average annual destruction rate of about 0.5 million barrel...