Posted on 08/04/2014 5:51:58 PM PDT by Lorianne
On the one hand, many environmental and conservation groups are bitterly opposed to shale development. Ranged against them are those within and beyond the energy industry who believe that the exploitation of shale gas can prove not only vital but hugely positive for the British economy.
Rather oddly, hardly anyone seems to have asked the one question which is surely fundamental: does shale development make economic sense?
My conclusion is that it does not.
That Britain needs new energy sources is surely beyond dispute. Between 2003 and 2013, domestic production of oil and gas slumped by 62pc and 65pc respectively, while coal output decreased by 55pc. Despite sharp increases in the output of renewables, overall energy production has fallen by more than half. A net exporter of energy as recently as 2003, Britain now buys almost half of its energy from abroad, and this gap seems certain to widen.
The example held up by the pro-fracking lobby is, of course, the United States, where fracking has produced so much gas that the market has been oversupplied, forcing gas prices sharply downwards.
The trouble with this parallel is that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the US shale story.
We now have more than enough data to know what has really happened in America. Shale has been hyped ("Saudi America") and investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the shale sector. If you invest this much, you get a lot of wells, even though shale wells cost about twice as much as ordinary ones.
If a huge number of wells come on stream in a short time, you get a lot of initial production. This is exactly what has happened in the US.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Did he see what West Texas looked like before the wells? How would you know, except for a concrete pad?
I think that is one of the author’s points, though few here seem to understand he is talking about the economics of the issue.
I think that is what the author is talking about ... the economics of getting it out of the ground.
I rather doubt the author has been within a thousand miles of downtown Wink...
Nah the author of the article has NO CLUE as to what he is talking about. He acts as if the ‘dot com bubble” was due to anything other than the greed of people like him. He had no product. He had fancy words. He thought people would jump on board. Once people figured it out they quit investing. That is snake oil salesmanship at its finest.
Shale oil like natural gas wells will be active and then they may be capped until it is more reasonable to uncap them. This has been true for almost one hundred years...... that hardly constitutes a ‘bubble’
Another environmetnalist propaganda puff peice to brain wash the sheeple masses.
The article is about the economics of shale recovery, not the environmental side. We will find out if it is truly profitable or not. Obviously at some price shale recovery would be profitable, but that price would be quite high.
Obviously we could do that. At some (high) price it would be profitable to extract and export natgas and shale oil.
But that would make our energy prices much higher as well.
Oil prices vary only slightly around the world based on transportation cost, so oil prices would not be affected by permission to export oil. Natural gas prices would not be affected much by large LNG export volumes. If prices rose $1.00/mcf, about 20%, known plays would become economic and production would increase sharply. Meanwhile, exploration and production and LNG facilities construction would boost the U.S. economy.
Then why aren’t they already doing it.
If they could make money at it they would be doing it. It does not make economic sense at this time. And when it does make economic sense, the cost to us in the USA (as you said price doesn’t vary much globally) will go up accordingly.
Yes indeed it is about the economincs of shale recovery, but the person put a bad spin on it who might happen to have a agenda.
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