When I started reading your post DS I figured perhaps the Earth is consuming oil faster than it produces it? You know, abiotic oil in reverse.

Seriously, that's worthy of a keypost in of itself. That decline in the Barnett Shale is staggering, if this is going on perhaps top down machinations are in play somehow. Caruso is stepping down next month, wonder if he has a skeleton in the closet or whistle to blow here?

This is a piece from Matt Simmons calling into question EIA data: Matthew Simmons on Inventories « Crude Oil, which is excerpted from his PDF Anothern Nail in the Coffin of the Case Against Peak Oil. In case you haven't read these.

There has never been a government audit to see how many stock data reporters actually take a physical measurement. There is no penalty (or reward) for efficiently completing what one could argue is the world’s most important glimpse into our country’s fuel supply.

Regarding the IEA, Birol has stated in interviews that government intervention will in all likelihood be necessary to cope with supply falling short of demand. SailDog will perhaps expand on that.

Yes, and this gets reflected in the financials of those operators that are heavily committed to the exploitation of these shale plays.

Take Chesapeake Energy, for instance. Direct from its own financial statements, look what is happening to costs:

                                          Investment in
Quarter          Oper. Costs           Property & Equipment
                 (per MCF)         (per MCF produced during qtr)
Q2-2003           $2.27                     $58.86
Q2-2004            2.60                      63.54
Q2-2005            3.11                     120.80 
Q2-2006            3.90                     116.52
Q2-2007            4.50                     154.00
Q2-2008            4.73                     142.71

In the last five years, production costs per MCF have increased by 208% while the amount of investment required to produce an equivalent amount of gas is up even more, by 242%. Gas prices, however, have increased only 142%, from $5.64 in Q2-2003 to the current $8.11.

If some pretty hefty increases in the price of natural gas are not in the offing, I would question the continued economic viability of these resource plays.

In this regard the EIA is a little vague as to its sampling methodology:

Two volumes are requested from respondents:

(1) “gross withdrawals (wet),” which is full-bore well stream gas minus lease condensate, oil, and water; and

(2) “natural gas lease production,” (sometimes referred to as “sales production” or “gas available for sales,”) which indicates the net amount of produced gas that leaves the lease to go to natural gas processing plants or directly to end-users.

The Texas Reailroad Commission, however, does make the distinction and casinghead gas production constitutes only about 2 BCFPD of total natural gas production, so leaving that out wouldn't be enough to explain the difference.

Jbunt, if you were running XT then you would click on "Start", then "control panel", then "appearance and themes". There set screen resolution to 1280 - 960. That would do it.

However I don't guess that works with Vista. But Vista MUST have a way to change the screen resolution. Try googling "Vista changing screen resolution". That should tell you how to do it.

In MS Explorer, which I'm using, one can go to "view" and reduce the text size from "largest" or "larger" to "medium" -- then the whole chart can be viewed.

In addition to Darwinian's suggestion to up the screen resolution, (apologies if this is obvious) but please also click the Full-screen icon at the top right of the browser screen (between the X to close and _ minimize)if you haven't already done so. This gives the browser more space to display the charts/text.

The reason I mention this is because it is unlikely if you are running Vista on a new machine that you would be at a screen resolution too low to display the above table correctly in full screen mode (I reckon you'd need to be at 800*600 which you wouldn't normally expect a Vista machine to be running at). If you are using full screen mode then follow Darwinian's suggestion or get someone who can help to do it.

If it's not a new machine and you have updated an old machine with Vista it can happen that Windows defaults the resolution to a lower value depending on drivers and questions during setup but you should still be able to change it.

It's also , of course possible, that someone has intentionally adjusted your resolution and/or font (text) size to make it easier to read.

Oh, finally - nearly forgot -if you have a sidebar open (left of browser window) then close it. Hope this makes sense.

Many thanks guys - sorry that it was embarrasingly so simple.