Energy Inaccuracy Agency
"The United States Energy Information Agency (EIA) disseminates its data products, analyses, reports, and services to customers and stakeholders primarily through its website and the customer contact center. Located in Washington, D.C., EIA has about 325 federal employees and a budget of $122 million in fiscal year 2017." Wikipedia
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These EIA folks, seen above in a Monday staff meeting, are all over the map with their predictions about America's hydrocarbon future. Personally, I think they come up with the stuff they do because they are told to by the current administration; it helps to calm the masses about declining oil resources in our nation and further advances the very bad concept of isolationism from the rest of the world. And besides, to "exert our energy 'dominance' on the rest of the world with reliable oil exports," as the President says, we have to make sure we have made up enough fictitious reserves to not piss Americans off about exporting America's oil resources away.
In its recently released AEO2018 report the EIA, from 2016 to 2017, has magically given America more than 61,000,000,000 more barrels of proven shale oil reserves to recover. An always perceptive, Art Berman, has this hooey nailed in the following three charts:
And finally, the big whopper of them all, the Permian, where the EIA just doubled ALL of America's proven oil reserves:
Mind you, we have been hammering America's three major shale oil basins for a decade now and according to my smart friend, Enno Peters, here, we have drilled almost 83,000 shale oil wells (that with initial land acquisition and midstream infrastructure has cost well over $1.5 trillion dollars) and have recovered... 8G BO, total.
Creating 61G BO of additional shale oil reserves out of thin air in one year, based on what, technology(?), is ridiculous. It will take 600,000 wells to recover that, if it even exists, and more than $7 trillion to loan to the shale oil industry. By 2025 there will be no room for people to live in West Texas (which is good...there won't be any water left for anybody to drink anyway) because the entire Permian Basin will look like this, according to the EIA:
Remember years ago when Matt Simmons and all of the West use to rail mercilessly on OPEC, the Middle East and Russia for lack of reserve transparency?
Phfffftt. We got them dudes beat, big time. America can now make stuff up with the best of 'em.