I think that the author is wrong about this. Russia has a shale formation that is - get this - EIGHTY TIMES the size of the Bakken Play. It's called the Bazhenov Formation. It's located in western Siberia and the area is already criss-crossed with gas pipelines.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2012/06/04/bakken-bazhenov-shale-oil/
Every major oil producing basin has somewhere within it a world class source rock. Some, like in the Gulf of Mexico, are too deep and plastic to be considered viable. I am still waiting for announcements from the Middle East, North Africa, and South America about source rock plays. From what I have heard, the Vaca Muerta in Argentina is not living up to expectations and it has an obvious geopolitical risk. It is like gold mining. For all the placer deposits out there, one can only dream of the Mother Lode.
Could that be related to their belief in the abiotic oil hypothesis?
Who really knows--but this is no time for shortsightedness.
I checked out your link and then decided to seek some other information. At a June 2012 posting I found this information on the Bazhenov formation. I think the site was The Oil Drum, a professional site for oil people.
“Everyone has heard about the Bakken shale, the huge expanse of oil-bearing rock underneath North Dakota and Montana that billionaire Harold Hamm thinks could yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come. The Bakken is a huge boon, both to the economic health of the northern Plains states, but also to the petroleum balance of the United States. From just 60,000 barrels per day five years ago, the Bakken is now giving up 500,000 bpd, with 210,000 bpd of that coming on in just the past year. Given the availability of enough rigs to drill it and crews to frack it, there’s no reason why the Bakken couldn’t be producing more than 1 million bpd by the end of the decade, a level that could be maintained for halfway through the century.
But as great as the Bakken is, I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken.”
The interesting point here is that the AREA of the Bazhenov site is 80 times the SIZE of the Bakken. However, this does NOT mean that the amount of reserves is 80 times. That is effected by thickness of sites, total penetration of areas, and extractability of the existing sources. We need more information of that type before we get too excited. Still, it is a very large area, and worthy of a lot more consideration.
I think you are misreading this.
The important fact is the dropping oil prices. It is not that Russia and Saudi Arabia will not be able to sell oil or that they will not be big players in the oil and gas market. But they will become smaller players as the number of exporting nations grows.
Presently both Russia and Saudi Arabia are THE big players and enjoy high prices for crude that permits them to have export trade surpluses and flush bank accounts. (It allows Saudi princes to export Islam and terrorism. It allows Russia to blackmail former Soviet client states with the cut off of fuel)
With falling oil prices would mean leaner bank accounts, small state budgets and less geopolitical clout. OPEC will loose control of world oil prices and their production quotas will become meaningless (more so).