DISQUS

Next Big Future: Anti-peak oil and peak oil people agree: US natural gas production will increase by a lot

  • cjwirth · 1 year ago
    it may help a little, but when oil hits $200 and $500 per barrel, there won't be much capital around for manufacturing the rigs for all of the drilling, transporting the equipment all over, and transporting the workers. and when the gas stations are closed???

    it takes energy to get energy, and NG is no exception, and the energy it takes is oil

    read below:

    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4376#more

    westexas on September 5, 2008 - 11:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | [Parent subthread ] Comments top

    Texas serves as a pretty good model.

    In 1972, we produced about 7.5 TCF from 23,000 gas wells.

    From 2002 to 2007, we increased our production from 4.8 to 5.7 TCF, but it took about 23,000 gas wells.

    In other words, in order to boost our net production by 0.9 TCF over a five year period, it required the same number of wells that we had in total in 1972, when we produced 7.5 TCF.

    It seems to me that in order to keep our total gas production rate increasing nationwide, we are going to have to have an infinite rate of increase in the number of wells that we drill, complete and connect to gas lines.

    For Texas, the gas well count, at our current rate of increase, would like like this:

    2002: 65,000 wells

    2012: 118,000 wells

    2022: 215,000 wells

    2032: 387,000 wells

    Note that the incremental rate of increase in net production per well has been about 100 MCF per day. On a BTU basis, this is about 17 BOE per day per well.

    BTW, the Texas RRC has added a Barnett Shale summary section. So far, it looks like production is going to be approximately flat year over year in 2008, versus 2007.

    It might be interesting to look at the total cost of new wells versus the incremental increase in net production per well nationwide.

    I suppose we could do a similar calculation for world crude oil production. In May, 2005 the EIA showed it at 74.3 mbpd. In May, 2008 (subject to revision) they showed it to be 74.5 mbpd. I wonder how much money the industry spent in three years in order to increase the net crude oil production by 200,000 bpd, from May, 2005 to May 2008?

    http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
    http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html