November 19, 2017
It’s official: US to dominate oil and gas markets
By John Smith
There is an ongoing power shift in the world energy market that is receiving scant attention in the MSM. The International Energy Agency (IEA) in its annual publication, World Energy Outlook, predicts that the U.S. will dominate the global oil and gas markets for many years to come as a result of the shale boom, which is the biggest supply surge in history.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/11/its_official_us_to_dominate_oil_and_gas_markets.html#ixzz4z01M7FnC
My belief is the abilities of the USA to continue to increase the amount of produced hydrocarbon liquids is overstated in articles like this. One must look not just at technologies used to extract, which have advanced considerably (so much, that I view the value of the current technology of horizontal drilling/stage fraccing as one of the only technologies that can compete with the value created by the technology of using seismic to find fields), but one must also look at the reservoirs from which these liquids are extracted from.
It is a fact that a large amount of the liquids being produced from unconventional formations are in fact not oil at all. Instead, they are actually gas within the reservoir. I cannot overstate the problems with a relatively viscous fluid like oil has in moving through such low permeability formations, even if fracced.
The types of formations in which appreciable amounts of oil can be produced from are in fact fairly limited by geology, with the Bakken, Eagleford and a smattering of Niabrara as the top ones. Most of the Permian wells being drilled are not really in unconventional formations. The current Permian drilling is mostly redrilling fields developed with vertical wells using horizontal wells. And those results are not necessarily meeting expectations. See
http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,289409.msg1503981.html#msg1503981
