One of the cogent points made in Richard D Hall's talk in Alvechurch back in March, was that protest is useless - it goes unreported, or gets smacked down physically. If you want to oppose fracking, he said, the best way is to show that there just aren't the economically recoverable resources that have been claimed by the oil industry and the government (who each have their own motives for bigging it up).
And so it proves. Last month (htp: John Michael Greer) the field in Monterey, California - previously said to have 64% of the potential shale oil output in the lower 48 States - had its estimate cut by 96%. The prospective cornucopia of 13.7 billion barrels has dwindled to a spit of 600 million.
How do they get these estimates, anyway? It's not as though the industry has Superman's X-ray vision. Is it much more than holding a wet finger in the air to check which way the wind is blowing? And would that be the resource wind, or the political wind?
Now what?
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5 comments:
I assume such estimates are made to suit the financial convenience of the CEO. 'What would you like it to be sir?'
I think it most likely that their first estimates did not take into account how hard the shale oil is to extract. Shell found that it took more energy to heat so it could flow than could be obtained by burning it.
And they believed their own first estimates?
Perhaps some hedge fund speculator believed them.
Perhaps some hedge fund speculator believed them.
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