I wish I were more optimistic.

Did I post this Is Shale Oil Production from Bakken Headed for a Run with “The Red Queen”? when I read it a couple of months ago? Probably not. (See the most recent post on this topic here.) As usual for The Oil Drum blog, the comments are as educational as the alpha post.

Here's the thing. Fracking is expensive. So the price needs to remain high to sustain it. Shale oil wells decline quickly. So you need to keep replacing them with new wells, more often than the easy oil of yesteryear. The environmental damage is greater than conventional wells. Natural gas is great stuff, but we don't use it for transportation very much, and our infrastructure for other uses lags the spike in production. The excess has to be exported, or stored, or burned at the well head.

The recent boom will bust. It can be used as a bridge to the future of energy or as a way of ignoring that future.

Choose wisely.