In depth article in Nature warning against the current unfounded euphoric optimism regarding the scale of the future supply of shale gas (&oil). This is a long in depth article based on a Texas study that has taken a much finer grained look at reserves than the EIA did and based on their much finer grained data has come to a very much more pessimistic outlook than the naïve (bordering on the unethical and dishonest, IMO) boosterism of the EIA. Quoting from somewhere in the middle of the article is the crux of how the very different set of projections were produced.
Here is a link to the full article in the journal Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/natural-gas-the-fracking-fallacy-1.16430 “The main difference between the Texas and EIA forecasts may come down to how fine-grained each assessment is. The EIA breaks up each shale play by county, calculating an average well productivity for that area. But counties often cover more than 1,000 square kilometres, large enough to hold thousands of horizontal fracked wells. The Texas team, by contrast, splits each play into blocks of one square mile (2.6 square kilometres) — a resolution at least 20 times finer than the EIA's.” Resolution matters because each play has sweet spots that yield a lot of gas, and large areas where wells are less productive. Companies try to target the sweet spots first, so wells drilled in the future may be less productive than current ones. The EIA's model so far has assumed that future wells will be at least as productive as past wells in the same county. But this approach, Patzek argues, “leads to results that are way too optimistic”. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
