Cartoon Of the Week
The largest proven, recoverable (1P classification) oil reserve holder in the world, Venezuela, with 301G (billion) barrels, has a national debt of $126 billion.
The 2nd largest reserve holder in the world, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with recently audited reserves totaling 270G barrels of proven, recoverable oil, has a total national debt of $134 billion.
Securities and Exchange Commission filings at the end of 2017 shows the public shale oil industry, alone, in the US has an approximate long term debt of 243 billion dollars. It is impossible to know what private shale oil debt is because it is not available to the public.
Rystad, the IEA, BP, and the EIA all suggest the US shale oil industry, public and private, has proven, recoverable (1P) oil reserves of something between 16.0 and 18.0G BO, this from three major shale basins and two minor ones. David Hughes, with the Post Carbon Institute, says less. So, the US LTO industry has about the same amount of debt the entire nations of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have, but only 6% of the recoverable reserves they do.
American oil production "rates" that has everyone in the MSM, and the shale oil industry, so excited
are meaningless; shale oil declines at the rate of 27% the first 3 years of production life and 10-12% annually thereafter. Its decline rates would look something like this (on the right), starting tomorrow if no more shale oil wells were drilled in America. In other words, here today, gone tomorrow....
Exceeding Russia, or the KSA in daily oil production volumes is nothing to be fixated on and neither is bragging about US LTO "exports" being greater than Russia's total oil exports. That's very dumb stuff driven only by nationalistic pride, little else.
What matters for America's long term hydrocarbon future, is reserves. 1P reserves and maybe 2P (proven, probable) reserves, not 3P, technically recoverable reserves from fields that have yet to be discovered, and then can only be developed if the price of oil is $300 a barrel reserves, nor what I call 4P (Power Point presentations made by the shale oil industry) reserves. Rystad likes to float all kinds of imaginary reserve categories, with little discussion of price, or where exactly those reserves might come from, and now most American's are convinced we have 100 years of oil left in America. Accordingly, more and more really stupid articles like this are being written every day.
As to proven recoverable oil reserves, the reality is that America is No. 10 in the world, not No. 1.
Yeooooowww !!