Cline Shale – another name you want to learn – “The shale rush has just begun” – Peak Oil #17

One of the biggest reasons that Peak Oil is so astoundingly foolish is the assumption that there will never, ever be any more oil found under the ground. Another huge assumption is that those dirty, evil, money-grubbing oil barons will never, ever figure out a new way to get the oil out.

This month’s object lesson that both assumptions are completely wrong is Cline Shale. I will have another object lesson in a few days.

Yeah, I’ve not heard of Cline Shale before reading this afternoon’s post from Million Dollar Way – Peak Oil? What Peak Oil? Now We Have the Cline Shale.

Another website you will want to check out and mark for future visits is The Cline Shale.  I can’t tell who is running the site, but it looks to be useful. Looks like the domain name is in a GoDaddy proxy registration.

Home page has a great report from CBS7 in the basin. Check out the report. One of the last comments about a second boom in the Permian basin is:

The shale rush has just begun.

Another source mentioned by Million Dollar Way is StreetAuthority, who reports: The Latest Major Energy Discover Could “Dwarf North Dakota”.

Two comments, with stock listings removed:

Two companies, Devon Energy Corp. .. and Chesapeake Energy … recently reported impressive test results in the region. Devon’s wells show that the formation contains 3.6 million recoverable barrels of oil per square mile. As the Cline is roughly 9,800 square miles in size, this works out to estimated reserves in excess of 30 billion barrels.

These reserves could easily eclipse the Bakken (4.3 billion barrels according to conservative government estimates) and the Eagle Ford (3 billion barrels).

Remember, those are wild guesses.  Several pieces of info there. Current estimates for Bakken are 4.3B barrels, with estimated 3B in Eagle Ford.

That very wild guess for Cline is 30B, which is 6.98 times as large as Bakken. Let’s round that to 7 times.

Let’s take that multiple and cut it in half. That means a wild guess would be Cline is equal to 3.5 Bakkens. Let’s say it is only one-fourth as large as the wild guess. That means it would be about 1.7 Bakkens, or 2.5 Eagle Fords.

Any way you look at it is astounding.

Drilling Info has an article:  Cline Shale Holds Enormous Potential.

They have the same info on possible size as mentioned in StreetAuthority. Article also looks at the heavy leasing activity and notes that housing is already very tight in the Cline Shale area.

Cline Shale.info has a list of news articles over the last few months – Cline Shale News.

Do a ‘net search on ‘Cline Shale’ and you will find a lot of articles in the last few  months.

How will this develop?

Maybe Cline Shale will fizzle out. Maybe the only good wells have already been found. Maybe the field isn’t what it looks like and maybe the layers are a fraction of the expected thickness. Maybe it will be a yawner of a field. Maybe it is all hype. Maybe the regulators will shut it all down.

But…

Maybe there will be 30 billion barrels of oil there. Or 15. Or even 3.

Peak what?

Big hat tip to Million Dollar Way