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US Officials Cut Estimate of Recoverable Monterey Shale Oil By 96%
First time accepted submitter steam_cannon (1881500) writes "The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA.gov) is planning to release a major 96% reserve downgrade to the amount of oil and gas recoverable from the Monterey Shale formation, one of the largest oil/gas reserves in the United States. After several years of intensified exploration the Monterey oil shale play seems to have much less recoverable oil and gas then previously hoped. This is due to multiple factors such as the more complex rippled geology of the shale and over-hyped recovery estimates by investors. By official estimates the Monterey Shale formation makes up 2/3 of the shale reserves in the US and by some estimates 1/3 of all crude reserves in the US. Not a drop in the bucket. Next Month the EIA.gov will be announcing cutting it's estimates for Monterey by 96%. That's a huge blow to the US energy portfolio, trillions of dollars, oil and gas the US might have used for itself or exported. Presently the White House is evaluating making changes to US oil export restrictions so this downgrade may result in changes to US energy policy. As well as have a significant impact on US economy and the economy of California."
One more incentive to the US to turn towards renewable energy sources. The USA are lagging way behind western and northern European countries in that respect. Last week e.g. the Dutch railways announced that from next year on, 100% of their operations will run on electric power from renewable sources, mainly wind, bought from a total of 5 north west European countries ( DE, DK, BE, NO, NL ).
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
First, I will say I have worked for a major oil company.
Second, I will say I have read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matthew Simmons, was an ardent follower of The Oil Drum petroleum web site - was more active there than I am here.. That site was full of petroleum engineers and field guys - and I trusted their insight far more than I trust words from any investment advisor sitting behind desk whose job it is to influence my decisions of how to allocate my retirement savings.
And Third, I will say I swallowed the "Peak Oil" paradigm hook line and sinker. Apparently messed up my retirement savings big time by investing in the energy sector as I believed with all my heart that we were in serious decline.
Suddenly fracking made the scene and all the investment buyers saw energy as plentiful again. And the price dropped, And many of the smaller guys sold out.
I cannot help but wonder if all this panic talk is them yet rounding up another round of panicky people and investors to make a poor investment.
I can't help but remember all this talk about how dire our energy situation was coming from our leaders. Then there is no energy crisis, Then there is.
Almost sounds like Donovan singing about petroleum. First there is a crisis, then there is no crisis, then there is.
We pay countless taxes into our government, and countless well-paid bureaucrats are supposed to be leading us, but does anyone up there really know what's going on?
So far, they seem to rank about as reliable as an ouija board.
How in the hell can anyone make rational decisions when no-one seems to take this stuff seriously? It seems lately all our government has wanted to so is snoop. 96% is a helluva big number.
I believe special interest tie guys have the government release all these "facts" in order to manipulate the market.
When I saw fracking, I was and still am concerned that was equivalent to "blowing the gas cap" on a dying oil well as once we relieved the subterranean pressure that was helping to push what was left of the liquid oil to the surface, we were draining the last "fart" from the earth before there was no longer enough energy recoverable from the lift effort than we were able to recover from the oil lifted. It meant the show was over.
I remain very concerned this whole fracking "happy days are here again" thing has been nothing more than a ploy to get control of the remaining oil reserves at a bargain basement price.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
It's because the majority of Americans don't really get taught proper English in school any more, and they pretty much ignore what teaching they do get. But they still get to pass classes and graduate, because it would hurt their feelings to do otherwise.
I used to work at an outfit where the majority of my co-workers were immigrants, as well as a large proportion of our customers. The worst at English spelling and grammar in both groups by far were the people born and raised in the U.S. I never really knew whether to laugh at that or be depressed by it.
Obama is looking to the future of death by oil carrying rail car.
Seriously I work in oil and gas. There pipeline will do NOTHING to hinder or advance the state of green energy. People have product and will sell product and there are plenty of people who want the product given it is sold at an incredible discount to standard oil. One way or the other the oil will get to its customers.
And the result is:
2008: 9500 railcar loads of oil in the USA.
2014: forward estimates indicate 650000 railcar loads of oil in the USA.
No that wasn't a typo. If you're going to transport oil you may as well do it safely. If Obama wants to actually push an environmental agenda then do so economically rather than playing with people's lives and potential oil spills.
The point is moot. Libruls don't want even 1 drop of it removed from the ground..
FTFY
Some of the most beautiful coastline on earth stretches from Santa Cruz to San Luis Obispo County. The waters are a National Marine Sanctuary. The Monterey Peninsula, Carmel, Pebble Beach, Big Sur are some of the most appealing destinations in California. The Los Padres National Forest extends into miles and miles of virgin wilderness from Ventana through the Santa Lucia and Coastal Range. The collision of the Pacific and Continental plates creates solid granite mountains rising up out of the pounding surf. East of the spectacular coastline is Steinbeck Country - the Salinas Valley, the salad bowl of America some of the most prosperous farmland on planet earth. It finds its water from the Salinas River which is the longest underground river on earth, as spring water percolates up from the range.
The idea of fracking here just makes me wanna stop driving. I can't believe this project has been moving forward all of this time with FALSE DATA from the lying scumbag pigs that want money from resources no matter what the long term cost to the planet. This terrain is the result of tectonics for billions of years, and all some folks can appreciate is that the fault line makes it easier to dig, and the bay makes it easier to transport. In a thousand years there will be nothing worth remembering about this era except for the beauty that was spared from human destruction. Every one of us will be dead in a century, why is that momentary presence so arrogant as to exploit everything possible just because we can.
Life will go on without sucking the Monterey Shale out of the ground so that some people get rich selling old technology to the "free" market. Somehow, I'm sure they can just move along to some renewable energy to sell when the fast easy bucks dry up. Good thing we found out it is already dry here, before they poisoned the golden goose.
Perhaps this is a sign that the rumoured Shale bubble is beginning to burst.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The stupidity of ignoring nuclear fission never ceases to amaze me. Fusion is still a long way from practicality, will always expensive and isn't the clean dream - the massive neutron flux just makes even more radioactive waste. The oil & gas are going to run out one day, be it in 5 years or 50. Renewables are unreliable, expensive and the quantities of rare earths required make for horrible mining pollution as well as covering the landscape with ugly windmills and solar collectors.
High activity nuclear waste is a small volume storage problem and if we hadn't wasted the last 30 years we would have modern fission plant designs far safer than any of the chemical polluting shit we have now.
Fricken' ridiculous.
Peak US oil production begat a rampant speculative market, which in turn sends our oil and gas prices soaring and crashing on a yearly basis. This is always quietly dismissed as seasonal demand so as to coddle speculators and assuage the fears of our politicians. Sustained high crude prices and a rapidly diminishing prospect of respectable foreign policy with regard to the oil market during the Bush administration led many oil and gas producers and their lobbyists to declare a diamond in the rough. This shale oil and gas to be captured through fractionation came at a time when to deem it suspect was nihilistic and we all tacitly agreed it must be true for sake of our own collective future. As our war machine contracted and our focus returned somewhat toward domestic policies and act of sustainability it of course became increasingly difficult to ignore what during the past 8 years was a boon of blank checks and exemptions from the federal government to be applied toward the shale moneytrain. Halliburton certainly wouldnt be the first to fess up, and nor should they as theyd worked hard to secure by hook and by crook some of the most lucrative and reprehensible federal exemptions and contracts in recent history. Shale is good, shale is great.
No. Like an alcoholic stumbling from a hot malt liquor hangover into the nearest gas station we scrambled to find anything to take the hurt away. That we like the rest of the world would have to firm up our collective constitutions and make seriously warranted changes was simply too much. We crawled back into shale oils warm cockle and clutched our crossover SUV for one more year. We looked to the tar sands and their beleaguered machination of destruction and waste as no more than a fine bourbon whiskey we partook of on occasion. Science, like a distant cousin with the bail money for the last bender, is shuffling us along into the rather unpleasant sunlight once again with heavy heart and a morose sigh. We either change or we die, because at this point Science will have existed as much with us as it has without us.
Good people go to bed earlier.
pipeline's leak lead to bigger spills.
Every drop of oil that goes through the keystone pipeline will be refined and then shipped to Europe. The companies behind the pipeline have stated as much.
The overall effect on of the pipeline is something like .05% of the world's demand. it isn't but a drop in the bucket.
Smart people would drain the oil away from the middle east first and save the Canadian oil for when things get bad in 50 years.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Where does this myth of slave labor pay in the oil industry come from? I live on the gulf coast in the middle of the U.S. petrochem region and the recent resurgence of U.S. oil exploration has lead to insane levels of job growth and prime pay for those lucky enough to work in the major petrochem plants. I was recently shocked by the reality of this at an extended family event at Easter, where I saw one of my wife's cousins, he is 23 years old, married with 2 young kids, and has a 2 year degree from local trade school and he makes over $100,000 per year doing shift work as an operator at one of the plants.
Quite a few smart people, including me, are profoundly disturbed by the safety problems with nuclear fuels and by their limited reserves. Refining U-235 is quite expensive to fuel grade is quite expensive, and quite toxic. Moreover, the current reserves will only supply about 200 years of energy _at current rates of consumption_. That's currently roughly 12% of world energy production, for roughly 6 billion people, with many in dire poverty and quite low energy consumption.
If we assume that nuclear consumption grows by a factor of 4 due to increased population and increased reliance on nuclear fuels, and reduced by a factor of 2 by switching to breeder reactors and improving efficiency, it's still only a 100 year supply. And as reserves drop, it's going to become much more expensive to mine as the more accessible reserves are consumed,
Fusion has _never_ worked as a fuel source. The main sources of the requisite deuterium and/or tritium are the ordinary fission reactors. Given the limited availability and difficulty of refining the necessary deuterium and/or tritium from any natural source, it is unlikely to ever _be_ an effective fuel source. Even the cold fusion experiments, if successful, promised no solution to providing the necessary fuel source. So one should not rely on fusion ever being useful for energy until it is either able to use plain hydrogen. (Yes, the sun uses plain hydrogen: no, it's not a method that can fit in a normal Earth based fusion reactor.)
Perhaps, in theory, one could refine fusion fuels from solar wind, which is unusually rich in such isotopes. But if one has a large collecting surface in orbit to gather solar wind, why not use that as a direct solar mirror and gather the much higher density and safer optical energy for ordinary solar power? A 100 meter diameter solar mirror gathers approximately 40 MW of power. With typical American energy consumption at approximately 1 kW, that is enough energy for roughly 40,000 Americans.
The luddites think its icky and we can all just use windmills. Don't ask me how they think they'll ever get a jet off the ground using solar, but I don't think they've even thought that far into it.
This isn't about ludditism. This is about what year is it? We can fly the planes on biofuels, but we should replace all air within a nation with high-speed rail. Which we should fucking have already, because what year is it? We should be running our planes on biofuels already, because what year is it?
We've had solar panels since the 1970s and they could repay their energy investment in seven years back then. Now it's three. What year is it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So you're saying that you support expensive energy, and further with that creating misery for those who can't afford cheap energy?
He's saying that "cheap energy" is a delusion - one fostered with temporary geological realities and utter lack of regard for any externalities - and that the sooner you snap out of that delusion, the better for everyone involved.
Ezekiel 23:20
If that truly was a concern for the pro-petroleum folks then why do we export so much of our gasoline and keep our domestic price high? FYI, the Keystone XL pipeline goal is to move the crude oil to refineries on the gulf coast for export.
If we want to take the long view and lower the cost of energy for everyone we need to spend more money toward finding alternative and more abundant sources of energy. This short-term strategy of keeping the status-quo and using the current stock of "cheap energy" does nothing but make petroleum investors rich, further damage the environment, and delay the inevitable to the point where the poor will suffer even more than they supposedly do today.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Exactly. This is in California? It's less likely to be recoverable than ANWAR, if only because the greenies would never let it be tapped because of NIMBY.
It is already being tapped. California produces more oil than any other state except Texas and North Dakota. It is even slightly ahead of Alaska. Here's the data.
I'm not sure why people "favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate political and social reform" should have any such opinion.
That is not what "liberal" means in American English. In America, a liberal is what Europeans would call a progressive or a social democrat. What Europeans call a liberal, would be a libertarian in America. In Australian English, "liberal" means conservative.
Don't bother. Republicans live in a world in which no drilling occurs during a democratic administration. That's why we still hear how turrible Obummer is to the oil industry. How he's ruined that resource for the US even though we're producing more oil now than ever. We're now a net exporter of oil; but Obama ruined it. Can't squeeze a single drop of oil out of the ground with Obummer in office.
And the constant mentioning of ANWR by Republicans again shows how shortsighted they are. Republican, the part of security and homeland defense. They'll keep us safe, but they want to tap a moderate resource for oil and gas (mean estimate of 10.6 bbl) which won't effect the market in any noticeable way instead of preserving it as a strategic resource so when the shit hits the fan we have 10.6 bbl to ourselves. Right now every drop of that 10.6 bbl goes on the market for Indian and China. Republicans, just thinking about you.
That is not what "liberal" means in American English. In America, a liberal is what Europeans would call a progressive or a social democrat.
While that is technically true, it's mostly just used as a curse word now for those conservatives who have no concept of compromise and do not understand the difference between opinion and fact. It's one of about a dozen words that mainly serve to make these stupid conservatives angry, a list that also includes words like "socialism" and "taxation." Sadly there are few words that actually make them happy, since that generally runs counter to the goal of conservative media with the obvious exception of schadenfreude. Their media go to great lengths to prolong anger and extract pleasure from the misfortune of those they call liberals. For example, they are still talking about the tragedy in Benghazi since, even though it obviously isn't working with swing voters, it keeps their base nice and angry and pliable.
Or, as Orwell called it, DuckSpeak. Why think about complex issues when you can slap around labels as fast as you can quack them?
Just get some Big Brother figure to chant the appropriate terms over the visi-screen or whatever.