e125.
For an introduction to shale oil, see Walter Youngquist, “Shale Oil—The Elusive Energy”, Colorado School of Mines, 1998. For comments on the potential scale of production, see, e.g., Chris Nelder, “Peak Oil Media Guide”, The Oil Drum, 13 July 2008; or Rich Turcotte, “Still Dealing with Peak Oil Denying Nonsense”, Peak Oil Matters, 22 November 2010. See also Randy Udall at the Aspen Environment Forum, March 2008, video available at http://tinyurl.com/6d2d3s .
From the 6 minute mark Udall comments—with tongue firmly in cheek—that: “Shell has spent $200m to produce 1,700 barrels of shale oil in the last decade. At that rate of production the shale oil that we have here in Colorado will last six million years. This is something that gives me great optimism for the future.” (cited in Shaun Chamberlin (2009), The Transition Timeline).
Editor’s note: David Fleming’s former colleague Dr. Roger W. Bentley offers the following comment:
Fleming was writing before the rapid expansion in the United States of production of ‘light-tight’ oil, which is relatively light flowable oil, but trapped in very low permeability shale or similar rock, from which it cannot be extracted unless the rock is fractured. The latter is usually done hydraulically (‘fracking’), and using proppants to keep the fractures open against the pressure of the overburden. Production of this ‘light-tight’ oil has indeed been a ‘game-changer’ in the United States.
But as the International Energy Agency’s “Resources to Reserves 2013” (available at www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/Resources2013.pdf ) shows, compared to the perhaps originally 2,000 to 3,000 billion barrels of global recoverable conventional oil, and the about 1,000 billion barrels of potentially recoverable shale oil (i.e., oil from kerogen in rock), the global endowment of recoverable ‘light-tight’ oil is perhaps 250 billion barrels (i.e., only about 8 years’ worth of global oil consumption), and there have been significant difficulties in extracting much of this oil outside the United States, in part due to the geology of this oil in non-US regions.