I lol'd at this oil analysis. The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this
>The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this
None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels.
Actually, not even any developments that might be created in the next 5-10 years, in the level that they can be applied within the next 15 years would solve such an issue.
> None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels.
May I suggest the combination of hydraulic fracturing with centimeter-precise horizontal drilling allowing oil producers (many of whom are badly run, granted) to access massive crude and natural gas resources previously unreachable?
Almost immediately after the article was written, US oil production hockey-sticked up to the point we were a net exporter of oil starting in 2020. The Salon analysis is actually hilarious against what actually happened.
This energy miracle may be a bit of a short lived illusion. The shift to fracking also resulted in a much lower EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Quote from [1]:
> Two aspects of shale production make it radically different from conventional production. First, it takes a lot more energy (including many miles of steel tubing per well, for example) to extract energy out of these wells. Traditional wells have a ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) of 10- or 20-to-one, or an energy cost factor of 5 to 10%. The EROEI with fracking is in the range of 5- or 10-to-one, or a cost factor of 10 to 20%
The oil from fracking also runs out very quickly. From the same article:
> A conventional well’s production declines at about 5-8% per year, and it can remain productive for decades. By contrast, the first-year decline in shale wells is over 60%, and about 90% of a well’s production occurs in the first five years. That creates a "drilling treadmill," as new wells are needed simply to replace production from wells drilled a few years before.
I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance".
In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.
Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel" that has an obvious bias against the thing that it is criticizing.
I wasn't trying to refute anything. I was just providing some context about the economics of fracking that I believed to be interesting to other HN readers.
Similar remarks have also been made by people in the oil and gas industry, it's not just an environmentalist meme:
> the technology that enables unconventional oil and gas production resulted in a 4-fold increase in oil and gas drilling costs from 2003 to 2014
>I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance". In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.
Or, you know, person A predicted something, and person B managed to avoid it by a kludgy short-lived workaround (that makes things worse, e.g. raises the price of gas to $3+ from it's 2014 price to now), and now people act as A's prediction is not a problem anymore because they want to believe...
Given that the US is now a net oil exporter, an oil shock scenario is pretty much off the table. Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too.
>Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too.
And yet the gas price is higher it's been since 2014 or so.
And "moving to EVs", with 280 million conventional cars in the USA atm, ain't gonna happen in any large degree for the next 10-15 years. EVs (including hybrids) are less than 4% of current annual sales, and all-electric are half that. That's even assuming there was the production capacity, battery materials availability, network, etc for this to happen - which includes several breakthroughs or handwaving micacles.
Gas, like all commodities, create their own business cycles. You don't want to compare spot prices, you want to compare trends. As a counterpoint, I could say "2 years ago, gas was cheaper than it had been since 2006"
this is not even remotely true, the only reason US is a net oil exporter is because combination of high oil prices & cheap money has created an artificial support environment where unprofitable stuff like shale oil can survive. take some of these factors out and add demand destruction (even as low as 5%) from EVs and you are back to wildly fluctuating oil prices with no end in sight because every year the problem will be incrementally worse.
if there is one takeaway from all this it is there are very few oil producers that are profitab;e above $50/bbl and US ain't one of them.
isn't not being dependent on fossil fuels the goal? If EVs cause demand destruction for oil then that's good no? The more oil left unburned the better, i thought that was the point all along.
who cares about wildly fluctuating oil prices if your country is no longer dependent on oil.
Oh I strongly agree about need of moving away from oil, I was just addressing the oil shock remarks parent made. I do worry about the compensatory behavior in non-ev addressed markets (like aviation, energy, food etc) just because oil prices are temporarily low after EV demand destruction. this is why I feel its best to start removing all fossil subsidies at the first chance we get because we may not want a distorted price signal to exist for any longer than it has to.
...and yet, those developments seem to have had little effect on the geopolitical situation. Everyone who tries to predict the future in this level of detail will have some misses, and it's always a bit too easy to criticize others' predictions. The question is whether their broader conclusions hold up better than mere guesswork, and I'd say this author did pretty well.
> and yet, those developments seem to have had little effect on the geopolitical situation
I beg to differ. Two years ago the Saudis and the Russians got in a bad spat where the Russians decided they wanted to bankrupt US natural gas producers and the Saudis decided to bankrupt the Russians
A good portion of this article dealt with energy security. The US producing a ton of oil dramatically changed energy security. And I was specifically responding to the claim that US oil production has not had a geopolitical impact. It demonstrably has
You really shouldn't tho.
>The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this
None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels.
Actually, not even any developments that might be created in the next 5-10 years, in the level that they can be applied within the next 15 years would solve such an issue.