No doubt the producers will improve their techniques, but it is inevitable that the shale formations will deplete.
Meanwhile, the cost of renewable energy continues to fall. Everytime you double the number of solar panels, the price of solar power falls by 26%. Everytime you double the number of windmills, the price of wind power falls by 17%.
I move in interesting circles. One of my gnomes that I only see yearly noted that Solar in CA has reached the point where the Utilities know the cost per KWH is so low that my gnome thinks their business model has too change, the price lines have crossed in solar's favor (Storage IMHO is still and issue).
Add to that wind's cost /KWH is lower than Nuclear, and we have a plant closing in IL because it isn't profitable anymore. Wind is ugly period, but Combined Cycle natural gas fired powerplants ( Turbine and Boiler to capture waste heat ) with their thermal efficiency of 55% to 60%+ is a way to use Fracking's Natural Gas to be clean and green ( green as in $ ) for Utilities IMHO and a great stop gap until Solar really breaks-through, or we get off our arse as a nation and truly go for "LFTR" Liquid Florine (cooled) Thorium Reactor.
I call total BS on that! Since basically all these Greenie sites are reporting that the cost of power from solar panels is currently around 12 cents per kwh (which is a total lie to begin with), all we have to do is install 8x as many of them and solar power will be only lets see... 12 - 25% = 12 - 3 = 9 cents per kwh if there are twice as many. Then 9 - 25% = 9 - 2.25 = 6.75 cents per kwh if there are 4 times as many. Then 6.75 - 25% - 6.75 - 1.6875 = 5.06 per kwh if there are 8 times as many. That would be nice, but unfortunately, it doesn't pass the sniff test. I am afraid that you are drinking the Democrat Kool-Aid on this one.
We actually installed solar panels on our camper van with 4 giant golf cart batteries and a great big inverter. We spent several thousand dollars on the setup. The first problem is that if you drove the van around town at all, carrying all of those heavy batteries used a heck of a lot more gasoline. The other thing is that the output from the panels is of course marginal if you are not in bright sunlight. It turns out that a four 90 watt solar panels put out less than 60 watts in typical fall and winter weather around here if you are lucky, and of course even at their full rated capacity that is still less than a third of what a typical 100 amp / 1200 watt van alternator puts out.
So once the batteries became discharged it would sometimes take days to charge them back up. We eventually had to hook the batteries to the alternator and through painful and expensive experience... disconnect the solar panels to keep them from getting damaged when we were charging the batteries with the alternator.
Of course the alternator or a portable generator puts out vastly more current than the cheesy solar panels and unfortunately, the solar panels actually do have a limited life span.
As it turns out we consider the money we wasted on the solar panels to be just that, wasted. I do not know how they come up with the 12 cents a kilowatt hour figure. It is a big lie. But don't take my word for it... go spend a few thousand of your own hard earned dollars on solar panels and see how it turns out for you. Without a huge government subsidy, it is a guaranteed loser. And don't even get me started on the giant bird killing windmills. They are the most disgusting waste of tax payer dollars in the history of the country.