North Dakota oil production expected to accelerate this year. Also two more new huge oil finds where oil wasn’t expected.

Photo by James Ulvog.

Latest guess, from someone who has a clue about such issues, on where production is going in North Dakota is somewhere around 1.5M or 1.6M barrels a day late this year or early next year.

Huge finds off coast of Guyana and in New Mexico/Texas.

Question needs to be asked again:  What Peak Oil?

 

The Million Dollar Way – 7/7/19 – ND Oil Production to Surge – Lynn Helms. Citing another source, the article says Lynn Helms, director of DMR, thinks production in North Dakota will surge later this year after gas infrastructure construction is done.

Mr. Helms’ guess is production will get to 1.6 million BOPD, which cited article says will be something comparable to Norway’s production.

Article also says there are still Peak Oil advocates saying that every pause in production rises is proof positive of Peak Oil doctrine. That means we will run out of oil in a few years. I checked the cited website and sure enough, there are still folks insisting we are about enter a permanent, unstoppable, inevitable decline in production.

How people can still hold that concept, I don’t know. Particularly in light of the routine appearance of stories like…

Axios Future – February 2019 (specific day not on article) – 1 big thing: Out of nothing, a new petro-state. In the last three years, ExxonMobil has made a dozen or more discoveries off the coast of Guyana (east side of South America, north of Brazil). Estimated recoverable oil is above 5 billion barrels. Five billion.

Exxon plans to get production to 120K bopd in 2020 and increase to a huge 750K bopd in 2025.

If they push, they might hit 1M bopd.

Down side is the country is poor, with political turmoil, and an infrastructure that won’t support that level of production.

That level of production would put the country at around the level of Qatar, without any concept on how to handle the flood of money that will soon appear.

Think of it – 750,000 barrels a day every day for 18 years at a 50% recovery rate where there was nothing known or expected a decade or two ago.

Ah, yes. Proof positive that we will soon run out of oil.

Or how about this…

Washington Examiner – 12/6/18 – Gusher: Feds ID largest energy find ‘ever’, worth 7 years of fuel. Secretary of Interior said that back in the 1980s mature basins like Permian were not considered to be places where there could possibly be any large undiscovered fields of untapped oil.  The boundaries of recoverable oil were known and everyone knew that Permian and similar fields were just not places to find new oil.

New technology changed what every knew to be a certain fact.

The Delaware Basin in southern New Mexico and western Texas is now estimated to hold 46.3 billion, yes billion, barrels of oil along with 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and a mere 20 billion barrels of NGL.

For context, the US uses 7B barrels of oil a year. At 50% recovery, that 46B could provide all the oil the US needs for 3.3 years. At 100% recovery, that would be enough to meet the US’s oil needs for 6.5 years.

Ponder that again…two huge finds where the energy wizards did not know there was any recoverable oil 30 or 40 years ago.

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