All the 'usual' shale oil players like Pioneer, EOG and Continental resumed their self-serving shale oil abundance bullshit the past week, with Exxon and Chevron joining the party, and after being in the field the past 8 days moving rigs, pipe, pumps and tanks around in the freezing mud, trying to work wells over, working my ass off to make a few bucks from my stripper well production, I came home Thursday to find the price of oil has tanked over 6 bucks a barrel, a whopping 10%, on fear of more stinking US LTO oversupply. But wait a minute, the correction is not over; on a huge increase in HZ rig counts we're down another $2.00 a barrel on Friday, to below $59. Stupid bastards. These fellers have the market savvy of a 3rd grade history class.
Speaking of geniuses, Oily Stuff introduced you to these two yahoos months ago, called the "Estimators." The really confused looking one on the right is with the International Energy Agency (IEA). The feller on the left, with one eye, losing his hair, is the Energy Information Agency and his outfit has now estimated (EIA AEO2017) that US oil production will reach over 11 million BOPD by 2019 and shale oil production will not peak until the year 2040, believe it or not. This shale oil stuff seems to keep growing out of the ground like weeds. No mention by the EIA, of course, how much money that will all cost, and get lost, or what the price of oil needs to be for this "miracle" to occur. But then again, the shale oil industry doesn't need stable prices to grow, it just needs more money to borrow. That must be why they keep driving the price down.
But shale oil abundance is a reassuring lie. Next week, if the price isn't $40 dollars a barrel and I haven't had to take a job at a car parts store, I will post on the inconvenient truth about how very little, reasonably affordable, shale oil we actually have left in America in a stunning new report by David Hughes and smart people from the Post Carbon Institute.