Oil booms have different meanings.
It takes 2000 truck trips in North Dakota from day 1 of drilling to 365 days later to drill, frack and carry oil from a well in the Bakken. 2000 separate trips, and average distance of the trip is 15 miles, so that’s 4000 segments to and fro.
These trips are mostly because the wells die so fast that pipelines can’t be put into place fast enough to carry the oil before the flow rate is too low to pay . . . for the effort to put in a pipeline.
Note that about 140 wells are brought online PER MONTH there. So that is 140 X 12 X 2000 = 3360000 truck trips (X2 for segments) to service a year of Bakken new wells. Additional tanker truck trips go out to fill up on the wells 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 years old (and of course past 5 years the wells aren’t flowing much so one truck can service multiple wells). All this truck traffic is in an area of 4 counties of North Dakota. So it’s certainly a boom for truck drivers.
Think about that cost . . . not in terms of dollars . . . in terms of effort . . . just to get 900K bpd out of the ground. Contrast it with the early 1900s when you took some lumber out into a field, threw up a 20 foot high structure, drilled a hole and got 15,000 bpd to flow from just that one hole, it it would flow for decades. Contrast those two “booms” — today’s versus then’s.
Think of that difference in effort level and then try to re-convince yourself everything is fine.
I buried the lead.
The typical Bakken brand new well flows at 400-600 bpd. Contrasted with 15K bpd from a new well in days of yore.
Think of that difference in effort level and then try to re-convince yourself everything is fine.
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true the easy oil is done. But there’s still plenty of the harder oil.
That said I agree with berman that the end is in sight for the oil age. I think that electric cars are going to win out.
And they won’t come a moment too soon because the demand for oil around the world is rising as more people enter the middle class and drive cars.
No need to re-convince myself, I've been posting "the world is awash with oil' since I signed up at FR. It just took a little while for the truth about Peak Oil BS to come out.