These sorts of articles are almost always written by people who know very little about oil and natural gas and the effect of resource depletion on production predictions. They have never experienced depletion in real life, have never known the negative affects of it from a financial standpoint (paying the bills) and refuse to look at depletion even from a worldwide historical perspective. All oil fields since the very beginning, deplete; read The Prize.
This year alone I have read a hundred articles just like this one and none of them even mention the word depletion. They hardly mention decline anymore.
The general public has been lied to so many times, by so many diffferent "experts" about oil and natural gas abundance in the U.S., it is essentially brainwashed.
The primary source of oil production growth in the entire world the past seven years has been from HZ unconventional wells in the Permian Basin, above. This phenomenal production growth has come from just six shalely carbonate resource beds (straigraphic sections) in the Permian. There are over 55,000 producing wells in these resource beds; over half of these wells drilled since 2014 now make less than 25 BOPD and 120 BWPD on artificial lift and are declining exponentially at the rate of 12% annually. They will reach economic limits and have to be plugged in the next 8 years. Sooner, unless operators can find more sub-surface formations to inject 22 MM BPD of produced water into,
New HZ wells being drilled today in over drilled, pressure depleted core areas suffer 85% decline rates in the first 24 months of production life.
No Permian HZ shale oil well will have a 30 year life span to generate these kind of BOE, EUR's in the map above. 766,000 barrels of oil, each?! Gimme a break.
Niney one percent (91%) of all Permian HZ tight oil production comes from just 8 partial counties in the Basin and there are wells drilled in these core areas that are producing in the same bench (stratigraphic section) that are only 500 feet apart. They communicate with each other. As these formations suffer pressure depletion from over drilling they produce more gas and less liquids.
An LSU graduate geologist commented on LindedIn a few days ago that oil resources in the Permian Basin are inexhaustible. Good grief. A geologist!
Almost everyone working in the United States domestic oil industry these days works in the unconventional shale sector. They need for the American public to believe the shale phenomena will last another 20 years or more, it just needs fewer regulations and more low interest capital to borrow. People in the sector, or cheerleading for it, don't want you fussin' about oil and LNG exports to foreign countries, or flaring, or earthquakes, or methane, or 3% dividends and they will never utter the word, depletion. EVER.
The United States only has 4% of the world's proven, producing oil reserves, yet it is the biggest oil producer in the world and the 3rd biggest oil exporter in the world. 48% of America's oil production comes from the Permian Basin HZ play. America can't seem to drain this area fast enough.
There is nothing "pragmatic" about energy independence, whatever that means, when you look at how crowded the Permian Hotel already is.
Canadian decline rates are no picnic according to a small oil company president that’s a friend. He shared some pretty scary numbers with me.