"Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with
existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once
thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean
rock spread across much of Central California, the
U.S. Energy Information Administration said. [...] The
Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the
nation's shale oil reserves."
Here's the source from 2009, which puts US "undeveloped technically recoverable" shale oil at 24 billion barrels, ~15 billion in Monterey (rounded apparently),
It is my understanding that projections and estimates from the EIA are generally understood (by experts in the field) to be political artifacts, and to generally be wildly optimistic, from the point of view of the fossil fuel business.
That probably goes equally for the revised estimate; it may have been adjusted downward in part to make some other prospect look relatively more appealing.
No, you're mis-reading the article. (1) They say expressly say fracking is not suited to the geographic topology in CA; and (2) They compare and contrast the monterey geology in CA to texas and ND where is it better suited. Basically, fracking is better in areas with flat-sediment-shale-beds. CA has dedformed rock strata. Similarly, much of the formation is not in heavily populated areas. They mention Kern county, for example, which is not considered a part of metro LA (it is seperated by a massive desert/mountain range).
It depends. Minor quakes in Oklahoma are believed attributable to fracking but it's hardly conclusive. Oklahoma hasn't had people who could read living on it for much more than a hundred years now. There's no data base; the people who lived there before didn't leave a record.
As hard as it may be to believe, there's not that much material doing downhole. It's usually as much-ish as a middling stock tank - a few million gallons - tennish or so acre-feet.
Determining cause and effect will be a mighty task.
Given California's politics, the geology ( fault lines ) and the way prices are working out, it's probably better left alone for now. The rate of innovation in fracking is staggering. The technology will be there sooner or later. I have a friend who's roughly from the general Kern County area and its a brittle place environmentally.
This being said, the LA Times is not exactly an oil/gas friendly publication - the quotes were all from professional anti-frackers. Sadly, since the Enron fiasco, we have to watch for that sort of thing. Claiofornia also has had "oil people" and "water people" and "oil and water don't mix."
> Another USGS analysis shows recent earthquake rate changes are likely not due to normal fluctuations in natural seismicity rates. Instead, the most likely cause is from wastewater being injected into deep geologic formations and causing faults to fail in a process called injection-induced seismicity.
(Did I miss a stronger statement in there?)
So random fluctuations are unlikely to be the explanation and, of the remaining explanations, the most likely one is fracking. As I read your articles, it does not claim strong evidence of fracking as the sole cause.
This is my understanding as well. During the drilling and analysis process, a lot of saltwater is extracted. The recent earthquakes in Oklahoma are believed to be caused by pumping this saltwater back into the ground. The pressures involved are very high.
Source: my uncle is a senior log analyst for an oil & energy company in Oklahoma, and this was his explanation to me last week.
One hair to split - saltwater isn't a result of fracking - it's a byproduct of drilling. A small point ( they're simply stages in a larger process ) but ... with fracking, material is pushed down the hole. The opposite is true of drilling.
Second, the case for increased seismic activity being caused by fracking is some where between "maybe" and "we dunno." It needs work. It will be hard because we can't observe it directly. I imagine your uncle sees ( or knows those who see ) nonlinearities in the data and fracking is just a darn good candidate for root cause.
The point is there are many people looking into this(not just Oklahoma either, Texas, Arkansas, the list goes on) and the only plausible explanation that has been put forward for this sudden increase in quake activity is the result of fracking related activities. (i.e. deep wastewater injection)
The bottom line is fracking is the new climate change. The Oil & Gas Industry is out there saying there is no evidence linking fracking activities to earthquakes and health issues when there absolutely is. They want to intentionally muddy the waters, so they can continue drilling and extracting shale oil. The burden of proof should not be whether fracking causes earthquakes and health issues, but rather that fracking does NOT cause earthquakes and health issues.
Devil's advocate: is the expectation that fracking increases the overall amount of earthquakes, or causes more frequent smaller earthquakes? If the latter, would that be beneficial in California, to release the energy in smaller quakes and prevent/delay "the big one"?
The number and complexity of the fault lines in CA is quite amusing. For refrenece, it is illegal to build directly on top of fault lines (per code). Howevere, check out this faultline going through some famous real-estate landmarks:
The san andreas and major faults like in the olympics are well know and more or less ~easily avoided. However, the seismology are then just are more localized, and not even CAL state has a great handle on where all its faults are.
Not that there's much of a San Joaquin Valley aquifer left to ruin by fracking, but politics and the sheer cost of trying to do business in California should mean the Monterrey Shale will be held in reserve. (Personally, I think I'd rather eat California produce than have cheap gas for driving around on foraging expeditions/pantry raids.)
Just IMO, but the two canonical books for this subject are "Cadillac Desert" and "The Prize".
The "gas in the water" stories are significantly contaminated by very bad propaganda. It's possible that they are true - that they are caused by fracking - but it's not likely. The depths are pretty radically different. Pennsylvania in particular is where Drake found oil oozing to the surface, so ... who knows what's down there, close to the surface? I know I am no geologist and even a good geologist may not have good understanding of that region.
I can say that I was born and raised in Oklahoma, and lived there until I moved to Texas in 1996. I had never heard of earthquakes happening in the state until the past 2-3 years when my mother mentioned them to me (she still lives in SW OK).
There's actually a lot of news out of that area regarding fracking and earthquakes, going back a few years. The data have improved over time and we've moved past the "correlation isn't causation so come on and have another cigarette" stage. An earthquake happening right under a fracking well is considered scientifically significant.
I don't know if the drilling is on the same scale in CA but I just assume that the eventual rules for avoiding faultlines will be even more strict in a state with a history of serious earthquakes.
Yeah, this is excellent news. The sooner we can cut down our dependence on the shit, the better. Local supplies just give us an excuse to keep sucking on the pipe.
Oil is of course part of a global market; that global market consumes ~85 million barrels of oil every day.
Even the higher 13.7 billion barrel figure was only enough oil to power the world economy for five months, assuming you could magically get it out of the ground fast enough.
I think people often forget this when they try to hand-wave away concerns about peak oil and think energy independence is just a case of allowing for more drilling.
On the whole we're burning through the easy stuff at a staggering rate, and when these are depleted, the only thing left will be the types that are far more expensive to extract. There might be a time when the stubborn tar sands are actually the cheapest, and the only other types of oil are even more colossally expensive.
That assumes no consumption growth. The economic argument from peak oil people says: "OK, when we're down to 10 years of oil left, just how much more expensive is a barrel of oil going to be, given that increasing scarcity is evident? Does that price rise also feed back to 20 years? What does it do to the economy, and/or what alternate forms of energy take its place due to economic pressures?"
So yeah, within your lifetime you'll probably feel the effects one way or the other.
Rather than just the single data point of "current oil reserves", you need to take the 1st derivative, and look at the rate of change in current oil reserves over time.
So far the delta in "estimated reserves" is tipping sharply negative because a lot of the glowy estimates by big producers such as Saudi Arabia are turning out to be nothing but wishful thinking and aren't based in reality.
Not to denigrate the importance of global warming, but, for now, the economy is so intimately connected to burning oil, it is as certain as any economic prediction can be that, if there is an "oil shock" there will be a deep global recession, and maybe a global war.
We're not ready for the end of the oil age. For an idea of what it will cost to get off oil, add up all the oil capex that got us here. Now spend that on something else. That's just not happening.
The alternative to this is a construction and market boom unlike anything we've had since the industrial revolution as we adapt to a world without plentiful "cheap" oil.
I'm not so pessimistic to think that this will automatically end in a global war or even necessarily a global recession in any case it will be an interesting time to be alive.
It's good to be optimistic, but the problem is that everything needs oil to be made and to move. Once demand can't be met, all parts of the economy bid against each other. Many people won't be able to drive to work. Many factories will not be able to make things at affordable prices and will shut down. Food will be vastly more expensive. Fertilizer is made of oil. Many more people will fall out of the middle class. Tens of millions of people, or more, will starve.
The overall economic result will be stagflation and there will be nothing that can be done with the spend, tax, or money supply levers. Less oil means a shrinking economy.
Energy is wealth. It took over 100 years to build this oil-based economy. We have 20-60 years left to get off oil. If we do not start a production line to mass-produce safe nuclear power plants and find a way to safely reprocess the waste, soon, it isn't going to happen in time. We spent trillions on wars and on bailing out an insane derivatives market. Will we have the capital to switch away from oil?
> It's good to be optimistic, but the problem is that everything needs oil to be made and to move.
No, lots of things are currently manufactured using oil and moved with oil because it's relatively cheap.
> Once demand can't be met, all parts of the economy bid against each other.
When the price for oil goes high the different alternatives begin to look viable which partially offsets this (one example, electric cars become far more viable when oil is twice the price it is now).
> Many people won't be able to drive to work.
Average person already commutes to work less than the distance a current gen electric car can commute comfortable plus working habits change, remote work, live nearer to work.
> Many factories will not be able to make things at affordable prices and will shut down.
Rising energy costs increase the price the end consumer pays if those items then cost more than people are willing to pay the product stops been made, this is the nature of markets.
> Food will be vastly more expensive. Fertilizer is made of oil.
Not sure why as we don't make fertilizer from oil, we make fertiliser from methane (natural gas usually) which is used to fix the nitrogen from air (NH3) which is the primary precursor for NH4NO3 (Ammonium Nitrate), the only time ammonium nitrate and oil meet is if you want a bang (ANFO).
> Many more people will fall out of the middle class. Tens of millions of people, or more, will starve.
No evidence for this either way to be honest.
> The overall economic result will be stagflation and there will be nothing that can be done with the spend, tax, or money supply levers.
Alternatively the massive push to restructure the economy towards a post oil future will create huge new markets and foster massive investment into non-oil power sources (batteries, nuclear, renewables) much like move to coal did in the 19th century and oil in the 20th.
> Energy is wealth.
Arguably you could use units of energy as a form of wealth but you know what we can extract more energy than we do right now world wide and never have to burn a drop of coal or oil, We have vast untapped reserves of nuclear fuels (the low ball estimates of a few centuries are largely because no one has looked since we had enough).
> It took over 100 years to build this oil-based economy.
Not really, it's been over a hundred years since we have had an oil-based economy the actual usage of oil boomed over a 15-20 year period in the early 20th.
> We have 20-60 years left to get off oil.
We (might) have 20-60 years to get off oil if we continue to consume it at our current rates, the price will go up as supply goes down, alternatives then become viable (nuclear and PV are not that far off on a kW/h basis already over their lifespan).
> If we do not start a production line to mass-produce safe nuclear power plants and find a way to safely reprocess the waste, it isn't going to happen in time.
Define "in time" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_in_France.svg France went from generating a third of their electricity needs to 75% in under 20 years, they now generate 40% of their entire energy consumption from nuclear.
As for the waste problem that is largely solved with modern designs, old plants where dirty they where dirty because the technology was less developed and because they where designed to produce nuclear material for weapons, We can and have built plants that use their own waste as a useful by product produces vastly less waste.
> We spent trillions on wars and on bailing out an insane derivatives market
The US spent trillion on wars and on bailing out the insane derivatives market but you know what the biggest producer of PV panels and nuclear plants isn't the US...
> Will we have the capital to switch away from oil?
One ( flawed )way to look to general fossil fuels is that they basically replaced ... slavery/peonage/unfree-peasant-try. That may not have been the only way, but it was in (low-resolution, crummy, more-or-less) fact what happened.
And spend the oil capex on what, exactly? Alts? If someone had a really good story on alts, they'd be trying to be the Emperor of alts, not just sitting there. Margins in oil stuff aren't good and it's got a lot of flywheel in skills, infrastructure and distribution. Spend a weekend driving around on the Eagle Ford shale some time.
Oil equipment uses solar panels because it's used close to off the grid. It's not like they don't know about it.
About the only thing that's mature and could scale-up quickly enough is nuclear, and even that will take new-generation plants and new fuel cycles to escape the cost, safety, and waste problems of current nuclear plants. And we are starting with an inventory of nuclear plants that need to be replaced even before new nuclear capacity can displace oil. I'm certainly not trying to minimize the problem of switching away from oil.
We're already there. Gasoline in the US is 3.5-4x higher at the pump than it was 15 years ago.
And look at what's happened -- a new wave of natural gas exploration, expansion of alternate technologies like solar, smaller cars, and real life practical electric cars.
The fact that the tar sands are being exploited at all is an indication that the industry believes that prices will stay at least at current levels for many years to come.
Gasoline 15 years ago was way under expected price based only on the estimates of inflation. It goes up, it goes down. There've been times Cushing, Ok was full and gas was way up.
At the time he pointed out that much of the original estimate was derived from oil company investor presentations. Perhaps not the most unbiased source for the EIA to use.
Allow me to disagree in both assertion and sentiment - "not recoverable with today's technology" doesn't mean much with the rate of progress of oil extraction technology.
And rather than 2/3 of the US Shale oil reserves, the 13b barrels is less than a quarter of the current estimate (58b - http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11611), which still leaves 50% growth in reserves over the 2012 figures.
And given the trouble throughout the world caused by US energy imports, I'd be happy to try exporting for a while.
48 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 66.2 ms ] threadhttp://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/usshalegas/
This looks dated, since the most recent "technically recoverable" estimate is 58 billion:
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11611
That probably goes equally for the revised estimate; it may have been adjusted downward in part to make some other prospect look relatively more appealing.
http://gen.usc.edu/news/monterey-shale.htm
As hard as it may be to believe, there's not that much material doing downhole. It's usually as much-ish as a middling stock tank - a few million gallons - tennish or so acre-feet.
Determining cause and effect will be a mighty task.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/07/01/water-f... goes to the water use, with awater always being the big item. David Blackmon is a bit of an oil industry flack, but his logic and numbers marry up to other sources well.
Given California's politics, the geology ( fault lines ) and the way prices are working out, it's probably better left alone for now. The rate of innovation in fracking is staggering. The technology will be there sooner or later. I have a friend who's roughly from the general Kern County area and its a brittle place environmentally.
This being said, the LA Times is not exactly an oil/gas friendly publication - the quotes were all from professional anti-frackers. Sadly, since the Enron fiasco, we have to watch for that sort of thing. Claiofornia also has had "oil people" and "water people" and "oil and water don't mix."
To indicate anything otherwise is disingenuous.
> Another USGS analysis shows recent earthquake rate changes are likely not due to normal fluctuations in natural seismicity rates. Instead, the most likely cause is from wastewater being injected into deep geologic formations and causing faults to fail in a process called injection-induced seismicity.
(Did I miss a stronger statement in there?)
So random fluctuations are unlikely to be the explanation and, of the remaining explanations, the most likely one is fracking. As I read your articles, it does not claim strong evidence of fracking as the sole cause.
Source: my uncle is a senior log analyst for an oil & energy company in Oklahoma, and this was his explanation to me last week.
Second, the case for increased seismic activity being caused by fracking is some where between "maybe" and "we dunno." It needs work. It will be hard because we can't observe it directly. I imagine your uncle sees ( or knows those who see ) nonlinearities in the data and fracking is just a darn good candidate for root cause.
There was a recent paper by a Cornell geophysicist that showed that 4 deep injection wastewater wells was responsible for a swarm of quakes in oklahoma -> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/05/14050...
The bottom line is fracking is the new climate change. The Oil & Gas Industry is out there saying there is no evidence linking fracking activities to earthquakes and health issues when there absolutely is. They want to intentionally muddy the waters, so they can continue drilling and extracting shale oil. The burden of proof should not be whether fracking causes earthquakes and health issues, but rather that fracking does NOT cause earthquakes and health issues.
http://graphics.latimes.com/hollywood-fault-flyover/
The san andreas and major faults like in the olympics are well know and more or less ~easily avoided. However, the seismology are then just are more localized, and not even CAL state has a great handle on where all its faults are.
Great piece from Mercury News on SJV water here: http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_25447586/california-dr...
Tip of the research iceberg on the obvious: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/groundwater-contam...
The "gas in the water" stories are significantly contaminated by very bad propaganda. It's possible that they are true - that they are caused by fracking - but it's not likely. The depths are pretty radically different. Pennsylvania in particular is where Drake found oil oozing to the surface, so ... who knows what's down there, close to the surface? I know I am no geologist and even a good geologist may not have good understanding of that region.
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2014/04/ohio_ack...
There's actually a lot of news out of that area regarding fracking and earthquakes, going back a few years. The data have improved over time and we've moved past the "correlation isn't causation so come on and have another cigarette" stage. An earthquake happening right under a fracking well is considered scientifically significant.
I don't know if the drilling is on the same scale in CA but I just assume that the eventual rules for avoiding faultlines will be even more strict in a state with a history of serious earthquakes.
Even the higher 13.7 billion barrel figure was only enough oil to power the world economy for five months, assuming you could magically get it out of the ground fast enough.
On the whole we're burning through the easy stuff at a staggering rate, and when these are depleted, the only thing left will be the types that are far more expensive to extract. There might be a time when the stubborn tar sands are actually the cheapest, and the only other types of oil are even more colossally expensive.
1324B/85M/365 = 42.675.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
That assumes no consumption growth. The economic argument from peak oil people says: "OK, when we're down to 10 years of oil left, just how much more expensive is a barrel of oil going to be, given that increasing scarcity is evident? Does that price rise also feed back to 20 years? What does it do to the economy, and/or what alternate forms of energy take its place due to economic pressures?"
So yeah, within your lifetime you'll probably feel the effects one way or the other.
It gives a dramatically different picture.
We're not ready for the end of the oil age. For an idea of what it will cost to get off oil, add up all the oil capex that got us here. Now spend that on something else. That's just not happening.
I'm not so pessimistic to think that this will automatically end in a global war or even necessarily a global recession in any case it will be an interesting time to be alive.
The overall economic result will be stagflation and there will be nothing that can be done with the spend, tax, or money supply levers. Less oil means a shrinking economy.
Energy is wealth. It took over 100 years to build this oil-based economy. We have 20-60 years left to get off oil. If we do not start a production line to mass-produce safe nuclear power plants and find a way to safely reprocess the waste, soon, it isn't going to happen in time. We spent trillions on wars and on bailing out an insane derivatives market. Will we have the capital to switch away from oil?
No, lots of things are currently manufactured using oil and moved with oil because it's relatively cheap.
> Once demand can't be met, all parts of the economy bid against each other.
When the price for oil goes high the different alternatives begin to look viable which partially offsets this (one example, electric cars become far more viable when oil is twice the price it is now).
> Many people won't be able to drive to work.
Average person already commutes to work less than the distance a current gen electric car can commute comfortable plus working habits change, remote work, live nearer to work.
> Many factories will not be able to make things at affordable prices and will shut down.
Rising energy costs increase the price the end consumer pays if those items then cost more than people are willing to pay the product stops been made, this is the nature of markets.
> Food will be vastly more expensive. Fertilizer is made of oil.
Not sure why as we don't make fertilizer from oil, we make fertiliser from methane (natural gas usually) which is used to fix the nitrogen from air (NH3) which is the primary precursor for NH4NO3 (Ammonium Nitrate), the only time ammonium nitrate and oil meet is if you want a bang (ANFO).
> Many more people will fall out of the middle class. Tens of millions of people, or more, will starve.
No evidence for this either way to be honest.
> The overall economic result will be stagflation and there will be nothing that can be done with the spend, tax, or money supply levers.
Alternatively the massive push to restructure the economy towards a post oil future will create huge new markets and foster massive investment into non-oil power sources (batteries, nuclear, renewables) much like move to coal did in the 19th century and oil in the 20th.
> Energy is wealth.
Arguably you could use units of energy as a form of wealth but you know what we can extract more energy than we do right now world wide and never have to burn a drop of coal or oil, We have vast untapped reserves of nuclear fuels (the low ball estimates of a few centuries are largely because no one has looked since we had enough).
> It took over 100 years to build this oil-based economy.
Not really, it's been over a hundred years since we have had an oil-based economy the actual usage of oil boomed over a 15-20 year period in the early 20th.
> We have 20-60 years left to get off oil.
We (might) have 20-60 years to get off oil if we continue to consume it at our current rates, the price will go up as supply goes down, alternatives then become viable (nuclear and PV are not that far off on a kW/h basis already over their lifespan).
> If we do not start a production line to mass-produce safe nuclear power plants and find a way to safely reprocess the waste, it isn't going to happen in time.
Define "in time" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_in_France.svg France went from generating a third of their electricity needs to 75% in under 20 years, they now generate 40% of their entire energy consumption from nuclear.
As for the waste problem that is largely solved with modern designs, old plants where dirty they where dirty because the technology was less developed and because they where designed to produce nuclear material for weapons, We can and have built plants that use their own waste as a useful by product produces vastly less waste.
> We spent trillions on wars and on bailing out an insane derivatives market
The US spent trillion on wars and on bailing out the insane derivatives market but you know what the biggest producer of PV panels and nuclear plants isn't the US...
> Will we have the capital to switch away from oil?
Yes of course, given raw ...
And spend the oil capex on what, exactly? Alts? If someone had a really good story on alts, they'd be trying to be the Emperor of alts, not just sitting there. Margins in oil stuff aren't good and it's got a lot of flywheel in skills, infrastructure and distribution. Spend a weekend driving around on the Eagle Ford shale some time.
Oil equipment uses solar panels because it's used close to off the grid. It's not like they don't know about it.
And look at what's happened -- a new wave of natural gas exploration, expansion of alternate technologies like solar, smaller cars, and real life practical electric cars.
The fact that the tar sands are being exploited at all is an indication that the industry believes that prices will stay at least at current levels for many years to come.
http://www.postcarbon.org/reports/Drilling-California_FINAL....
At the time he pointed out that much of the original estimate was derived from oil company investor presentations. Perhaps not the most unbiased source for the EIA to use.
And rather than 2/3 of the US Shale oil reserves, the 13b barrels is less than a quarter of the current estimate (58b - http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11611), which still leaves 50% growth in reserves over the 2012 figures.
And given the trouble throughout the world caused by US energy imports, I'd be happy to try exporting for a while.