Jean Laherrere on Proven Reserves

Jean Laherrere has posted the following charts and comments on Bakken and World oil reserves.

EIA proved reserves on Bakken (ND +Montana) plus  cumulative production have changed at end :

-2012   3754 Mb
-2013   5701 Mb
-2014   7203 Mb
-2015   6671 Mb

As shown in this graph in red squares, together with HL ultimates, USGS estimates and cumulative production.

jean-1

ThisEIA CP+RR value (which is assumed to trend towards the oil ultimate) has increased sharply from 2012 to 2014 and has decreased in 2015 (this decrease may continue towards which value?).

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Bakken Oil Peak by Jean Laherrère

This is a guest post by Jean Laherrère

The problem of forecasting future Bakken production is that estimating reserves of shale oil is harder than for conventional oil and is very unreliable because many confuse reserves and resources, and shale oil reserves depend more from economy than from technology. Many estimate the amount of hydrocarbons generated by the source-rock and believe that a significant percentage could be recovered: the study of the main Petroleum Systems in the world estimate than only about 1% will recovered in conventional fields, no more could be expected in unconventional fields.
US Shale gas production started in 1821 in Fredonia for lighting when whale oil price was about 2000 $2014/b, but was replaced by conventional oil in 1859 because a largely lower price.

How to estimate future production?

Drilling activity is a good way to model production with a shift.
In my MIT Paris paper «The end of the peak oil myth» MIT club de France- Paris 28 April 2014, I was convinced that North Dakota oil production will peak within 2014 using a correlation between oil production and shifted number of rigs, guessing the value of the shift and the relationship between rigs and production.

Jean 1

This April 2014 graph is wrong when adding present data at July 2014 (still rising after a minor peak in November 2013) and I have changed the shift from 20 months to 30 months and the correlation oil/rig, but I feel uncertain about the reliability of such graph.
When active in exploration I was used to drill 9 dry holes out of 10 wildcats: I am used to be wrong and I am not afraid of that. To make discovery you have to take risks.
My new model forecasts ND oil production peak in 2015 at less than 1.2 Mb/d, but again this new model could be wrong as the old one.

Jean 2

My modeling was based on the Montana oil peaks, which fit well with the number of rigs shifted by 12 months since 2000.

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Jean Laherrere’s Take, Plus Other News

Note: Jean Laherrere sent me the below post and asked me to post it in reply to comments posted by Dennis Coyne and Political Economist on my post Bakken Update, March Production Data. But that was several days ago, the comments are stale. Also it was too large for a comment. So since we are a period where there is a dearth of data, I decided to make a post of it. Below Jean’s graphs and comments I have added a couple of news Items.
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Policial Economist displays a graph for Bakken production Hubbert linearization trending towards 3.5 Gb, but it is from EIA DPR for the period January 2007 to June 2014 : it is not real data (we are not yet in June 2014) but estimates.

It is different from mine trending towards 2.4 Gb, but it is only for North Dakota Bakken using ND state data from 1955 up to March 2014.

In many of my papers I state that production Hubbert linearization is not very reliable and it is better to rely on the creaming curve of cumulative backdated 2P discovery versus cumulative number of fields. But for LTO there is no reliable way to estimate 2P reserves, because only the volume generated by the source rocks (using Rock Eval measures from cores) can be estimated but the amount lost from this generated oil and gas cannot be estimated and the recovery from what is left within the fractures needs longer historical data.

Laherrere E

The ND production excluding Bakken Hubbert linearization trends also towards 2.5 GbLaherrere

It is why I use a NG oil ultimate of 5 Gb with both 2.5 Gb for Bakken and non-Bakken.
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