Contradictory to what Citizen Obama once said, it appears that we can drill our way to prosperity. (Like so much of what that asshole said, it was completely wrong.)
Surging shale production is poised to push U.S. oil output to more than 10 million barrels per day – toppling a record set in 1970 and crossing a threshold few could have imagined even a decade ago.
That’s all good, of course, because it means that the other oil-producing shithole countries (the various Arabs, Russia, Venezuela etc.) get shafted and their economies flushed down the toilet, which is all good and proper.
Tucked away in the article — and unlike most crap from Reuters, this one is worth reading all the way through — is a lovely little nugget:
Fears of dire energy shortages that gripped the country in the 1970s have been replaced by a presidential policy of global “energy dominance.” [emphasis added]
Wait, wait… you mean that President Trump can count this as yet another one of his first-year achievements? Because it sure as shit wasn’t Obama’s policy — he wanted to put our energy industry out of business.
How it must have hurt those tools at Reuters to have to admit that — but note that they left out Trump’s name, lest they actually be seen to acknowledge his policy as a good thing.
I’ll leave you to read the whole article, but let me add one last little thing of beauty:
“New wells can be drilled in as little as a week,” he said. A few years ago, it could take up to a month.
I have been telling anyone who would listen that worrying about oil availability is a waste of time. This is not because I was reading the tea leaves on the fracking thing (I wish that were the case) but because even if fracking were not a thing, or the cost of fracking did not come down we still are not going to run out of oil any time soon.
The reason for that is synthetic oil from coal. This has been around since the 40’s (it kept the Wehrmacht running during the war). The problem with it is price compared to the price of natural oil. Synthetic oil costs about $100/barrel to refine, but that could be driven down to about $60 if done at scale. Of course if oil is lower than about $60/barrel; synthetic coal oil is upside down and the multi-billion dollar refinery you just built is loosing money.
OPEC is not stupid, which is why they tend to drive down the price of oil now and again to keep investment in alternatives out. All good, but if they actually “ran out” of oil, then coal becomes economically viable and we (the US alone) has enough coal to supply the worlds energy needs for a few thousand years that way. So long term, it just is not a problem and feel free to gas up your huge SUV guilt free (including global warming, but that is another discussion). The point is that long term, there is a ceiling on oil prices.
Of course fracking gets around this in two ways. First by innovators and good business men driving the cost of fracking extraction down a great deal – it used to be over $100/barrel in most conditions but now ranges from $25-90/barrel depending on the specifics. But the lovely thing about it is that it is distributed. Instead of a few huge refineries taking the risk, there are 1.1 million fracking wells in the US, so no one location has so much capital tied up that it is not worth the risk in the short/medium term when the economics support it. And of course, they are also relatively easy to turn off and on. So you can turn off your $90/barrel wells when the price goes below that and turn them back on when it goes higher. Beautiful stuff that is.
And of course, even if we do “run out” of commercially feasible oil some day, we still have a few thousand years worth of coal laying there to be extracted, and the cost of refining that is only going to go down too.
God is good and he set things up for us quite well if we are willing to look for it and work at it.