Arthur Berman: "Shale Oil and the Slurping Sound" | The Great Simplification

On this episode, Arthur Berman returns to unpack the complexity underpinning the oil trends of the last 75 years and what new data can tell us about availability in the coming years. After decades of declining oil production in the United States, the past decade of rising oil extraction has eased many worries about peak oil. But the past few years of continued growth have been obtained by using “a larger straw”, merely delaying the inevitability of the depletion of a finite resource. Art presents recent data on well productivity in US shale plays indicating we are much closer to ‘the slurping sound’. How does technology hide the declining availability of oil reserves, causing us to extract and use them faster without creating any new resources? Going beyond geology, how do geopolitics, finance, and social opinion affect oil availability? Where do we go when economically viable oil isn’t available anymore - and will we have the prudence to make the cultural shifts necessary before we have no other options? Have we now passed ‘peak oil’?

About Arthur Berman:

Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 36 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector.

For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.co...

00:00 - Episode highlight
00:33 - Guest introduction
06:38 - Art’s new research findings
13:49 - What is well performance?
17:48 - New high production leads to faster depletion
20:02 - Do oil and gas companies need money for drilling and upstream investment?
23:00 - History of U.S. Production of shale
26:48 - What do we drill next after tight oil?
29:56 - Tight oil peak before COVID and recent peak
33:26 - Are there other tight oil areas? Or will we try to do oil shale?
36:15 - Graph of the production of different types of oil
40:53 - What do we do about our financial claims once energy starts to decline?
41:59 - Is the U.S. aggressive in current conflicts because we do have abundance of oil?
44:45 - Over drilling and cannibalizing wells
53:11 - Rig count
1:03:50 - How much would oil executives and US Energy, ENP experts agree with Art and where would they disagree?
1:05:04 - What will production be in the future?
1:10:07 - What are the potential outcomes?
1:12:02 - Importance of lowering usage
1:15:39 - Why is the U.S. experiment unlikely to be repeated as a global extension of oil supply in the coming decade?
1:19:19 - How could AI change our energy future?
1:22:25 - Should AI coordinate the oil drilling so that we don’t cannibalize the wells?
1:25:05 - Final thoughts
1:28:07 - Future topics

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