Adverting spots have clearly been designed to sell America that the increased used of domestic natural gas in America's best clean energy source:
Okay, now we are all convinced that Natural gas is clearly America's best choice. Well, how much do we got, really?
Our Future energy outlook (although this one is from 2010, not much has changed) is clearly forcasting incrased use of shale gas and eventually more drilling Alaska:
But what is the state with our various shale oil reservers and
fracking? We present this in the context of the Marcellus Shale Basin generally located in Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia:
The issue then becomes how long can these fields achieve high production levels. Note that the decay rate of a Natural Gas pump is much shorter than an oil well pump. Gas is pumped out of the ground much faster and the corresponding pressure drops slows the yield per well quite dramatically. A typicall well has a lifetime of only about 3 years, before its down to 15% of its peak capacity.
As a consequence, replacement well heads are constantly being drilled while the shale gas field is ramping up its production.
This is clearly seen in the early stages of the Marcellus production fields:
The data below shows the early well head build out in the State of Pennsylvania from 2007-2010. By 2011, most of the wells built in 2007,2008 will be done with production and new ones will need to be built, those accelarting the horizontal footprint of envinmentally damaging well heads. This is one of the reasons that Penn State University is closely monitoring this development:
However, as shown in the following two diagrams, the early growth of the Marcellus shale basin could not be sustainted. This is true for any local shale oil basin - it is rapdily exploited and then settles into constant or slightly declining yield after 2-4 years. Hence, basing an energy policy using forcasting from the early growth period is insane, but this is exactly what the US has done! A lot of this is a reflection of the quantitative illiteracy problem, previously discussed.
Similar behavior will be seen for all the other shale basin deposits in the US - rapid exploitation and then decline. Given this behavior, as well as the liklihood that no new shale basins await to be discovered, US Shale Oil Natural Gas production will likely be over by 2030-2035 and, of course, we will have not ramped of renewable energy facilities to replace, what will be,
a relatively sudden shortfall of energy resource.
