<Financial Forecast for 2009, Considering Resource Limitations The Oil Drum DrumBeat: January 7, 2009>

50 comments on Natural Gas and Credit Situation - Nate Hagens Interview on Global Public Media

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Nate Hagens on January 6, 2009 - 10:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

"Dreaded" was not my choice of words, but this situation is a)very concerning and b) very beneath consensus energy radar.

Some friends at Johnson Rice and Co are helping me with some data (with intent for Jon Friese or David Murphy to come up with updated EROI analysis on US nat gas). But the above (preliminary) graph, shows well feet drilled and cost per foot. With production flat, this is very concerning, especially given a)that we are scraping source rock to get this gas and b)commodity prices are low vis-a-vis the cost rise.

The serious questions are;
1)when do we hit energy break even on NG?
2)what price for NG can North Americans afford?

Clearly at 'some' price, we can extract more gas - but how many other resources and people will be employed in nat gas industry at that point? EROI tells us how much natural capital surplus we have available for economic (or uneconomic) work. Similar ratios can be estimated for other limiting inputs – Energy Return on Water Invested, Energy Return on Land invested, etc. As net energy declines, it stands to reason that the Energy return on NON-ENERGY inputs will decline faster. (examples are going from concentrated light sweet oil fields to tar sands, needing both more land, and water inputs – ditto with biofuels.) Marcellus Shale has water permit limitations, etc.

The interesting part of this analysis is many of the newer wells are horizontal as opposed to straight vertical - this means they cover a much larger area and the 'straw' has a whole lot more sucking power.

Natural Gas - copasetic until it's not.

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gr1nn3r on January 6, 2009 - 11:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Copasetic, also spelled copacetic, copesetic or - less commonly - kopasetic, means very satisfactory or acceptable.

Copasetic is an unusual English language word in that it is one of the few words of seemingly unknown origin that is not considered slang in contemporary usage. It is used almost exclusively in North America, and is said to have been first widely publicized in communications between the astronauts and Mission Control of the Apollo Program in the 1960s

/No, I didn't know either

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davebygolly on January 6, 2009 - 11:17pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

My mother used it when I was a kid in the 40s and early 50s. I didn't realize it's an unusual word.

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lukitas on January 7, 2009 - 8:59pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The english word 'cope' derives from ancient latin french 'colper', strike a blow. I think it quite possible, that confronted with the english usage of 'to cope', american french speakers would use 'il sait couper' as 'he knows how to cope'. From there, a 'latin' adjectival derivation such as 'copasetic' could be imagined.
I think it is much more likely though, that southern blacks invented this word, using the english root with a latin inflection. They needed to cope, and whatever helps to cope is copasetic.

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totoneila on January 7, 2009 - 2:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hello Nate & Jason,

Great interview, Kudos!

Nate's Quote above: "The interesting part of this analysis is many of the newer wells are horizontal as opposed to straight vertical - this means they cover a much larger area and the 'straw' has a whole lot more sucking power."

Applied to your Red Queen treadmill analogy: this means not only does the treadmill need to go ever faster to offset the superstraw depletion, but the surface area of the treadmill needs to constantly increase too. Picture the treadmill going from 2 feet wide to 5 feet, then 10 feet, and so on. Yikes!

For example, let's say 20 years they only needed to annually drill the surface area of 1,000 square miles [with short vertical footage] to get one trillion cubic feet [TCF] of gas. Maybe today with the multi-mile superstraw multilateral horizontals: they are now forced to annually gobble up 5,000 square miles of surface area to get the same 1 TCF. Next up: 10,000 sq miles for 1 TCF-->pretty soon there is no place else to drill and/or you cannot lay pipeline fast enough to get the natgas to market.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

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50 comments on Natural Gas and Credit Situation - Nate Hagens Interview on Global Public Media

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