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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (9618)	10/14/2009 11:39:02 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24213

from the comments.. elwoodelmore on October 14, 2009 - 9:06am aurthur berman has recently posted an update on the fayetteville shale. you can access it here: petroleumtruthreport.blogspot.com scroll down past the haynesville article referenced above. and with respect to the collapse of natural fractures (and to a lesser extent the propped hydraulic frac's) there was an article published in 1992 by dan stright,etal discussing this phenom in the bakken formation of the williston basin. the title of the paper is: "Reservoir Characterization of the Bakken Shale From Modeling of Horizontal Well Production Interference Data" SPE 24320. i dont have a link, but an abstract is available through the spe elibrary. the generation of hydrocarbons from kerogen results in an increase in volume. in an ultra-low permeability (shale) , pressure builds up and creates an hydraulically induced micro-fracture. when the pressure is depleted, the micro fractures collapse. this has a lot to do with the rapid decline from reservoirs such as the bakken and haynesville. i have noted previously, that the pressures in the bakken and haynesville is coincidentally about equal to or greater than a normal frac' gradient (~0.7 psi/ ft depth). Reply \| Reply in new window \| Start new thread \| Flag as inappropriate (?) [new] Odysseus on October 14, 2009 - 9:24am The DVD's will be well worth the price. The whole "Natural Gas Game Changers?" section on Monday, followed by Matt Simmons in the evening really showed the wide variety of opinion on NG supplies. Most see PO as happening in 2008, now, or by 2013, the agreement on liquids peaking was very tight. Gas was really volatile in terms of any consensus on are we at or near peak. Peter Dea kicked off the session with "Abundant NG supply, an American Treasure" and was profoundly optimistic about the US having 100+ year supply of NG. I have to admit that his talk seemed a bit more in the cheerleader mode and not a critical scientific analysis. But, not being a total doomer - I hope he's at least partially right! Arthur Berman raised some serious concerns about rapid crashes in the shale gas fields. He has studied about 4000 wells in detail using company supplied data that is available in the public domain. It seemed pretty irrefutable and he was begging others to look at his data and show him where he is wrong or could have made errors in his analysis. He struck me as a straightforward engineer/scientist and genuinely wants to debate and discuss his findings. My main take-away is to urge extreme caution toward those who invest in shale gas plays and expect huge returns. The financing of all the shale drilling looks like a replay of our current credit debacle at best and at worst a Ponzi scheme that will implode as wells die and the ROI crashes with the cash flow from these wells. No one disputes there are a few wells that are gems but as a whole, the frac jobs don;t last and they plug back up with the most spectacular fall off in flows. Hyberbolic declines cannot model this, only a deep death exponential can explain the data. Time will tell. Mr. Berman's somewhat downer was followed by Ed Warner's talk on how he got a dead small NG play to come to life and the result is perhaps the richest NG field in the USA today, the Jonah Field. Inspiring and a strong reminder that "we don't know what we we think we know". Simply put we don;t have the mental models or ideas to understand what is really goin on below ground. Innovation and human imagination are big, big wild cards in this industry. This was not a cornucopia plea but rather a warning to include big enough error bars in our calculations for the disruptive influence of not just technology but of new ideas and world views. A valid point and echoed by other speakers. We will not know the black swan that is out there in the future looking for a place to land, and similarly we don't know of potentially game changing discoveries and technology (like the Brazil pre-salt) that could change the game. Lastly, Mr. Warner ended with a plea for the US to get back into the nuclear game. He rapidly ticked off many nuclear myths and showed data that surprised me on how despite only one new plant in the US we make more nuclear power than France and other countries that most people consider ahead of the US. Lastly, Matt Simmons has the evening keynote talk and a couple of quotes summarize his view on gas: "Gas has peaked", and "data on NG (production) makes oil data look pristine".