Month: August 2019

USA Oil Production

Ron Patterson 455 Comments

The Real Reason Why US Oil Production Has Peaked

Raymond James recently estimated that over the last three years the U.S. decline rate for oil has doubled from 1.6 to 3.2 million barrels per day. The drilled but uncompleted well inventory (“DUC”) is back to normal, so the number of wells being drilled and the number of wells being completed is now about the same. We need over 12,000 new horizontal oil wells completed each year to hold production flat and the number of completed wells will need to go up each year.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (“EIA”) forecast at the beginning of this year was that the U.S. shale oil plays were just getting started and that production would increase by at least 2 million barrels of oil per day (“MMBOPD”) each year for several more years.

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Climate Variability vs AGW

Paul Pukite 82 Comments

Emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuel contributes significantly to a gradual increase in the world’s average temperature.  What’s also known but less understood is the erratic variation in the average temperature due to cycles in the ocean, resulting in episodes of El Nino and La Nina.  Some claim that these temperature extremes are well-understood as a result of changes in the trade winds, as the wind pushes the water around the Pacific ocean, exposing colder or warmer water to the surface. This may have been a perfectly acceptable explanation, except it doesn’t address what causes the wind to vary — in other words the source of the erratic wind variation is just as unknown.

So we are still left with no root cause for the ocean cycles. Apart from the strictly seasonal changes we have no explanation for the longer-term pattern of natural variation observed.

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Permian Basin Scenarios

D Coyne 143 Comments

Seems we don’t know what future completion rates will be in the Permian basin or anywhere.  There are many different opinions on whether the completion rate might increase, decrease or stay the same.  In my view, the conservative assumption is to assume they will not go up or down, but that the completion rate will remain constant.   I have created three different scenarios: in the first, the completion rate increases; in the second, the completion rate decreases; the third scenario has a constant completion rate. 

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