[300bps]

The article's oil analysis is laughable in hindsight. Look at this chart:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

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.

[wcoenen]

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.

[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/is-fracking-a-...

[300bps]

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.

[wcoenen]

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

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurberman/2017/07/05/shale-g...

[coldtea]

>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...