When we began this series of tech talks, a drilling rig was anything that punched a hole through the ground, to get at the oil or natural gas underneath. Once a hole is drilled, however, there is often other work that needs to be done on the well, but now the infrastructure that helped when we drilled the well starts to get in the way when we need to do other things. And so the tool will change to what is known as a workover rig. (Though these could be the old rigs left in place on a platform after the production wells are drilled - just to keep life clear).

Monday, November 2, Arthur Berman wrote in his blog:

Pressure from Petrohawk helps cancel World Oil column

In an act of extraordinary courage, a top Petrohawk executive threatened to cancel his free subscription to World Oil if the magazine continued to publish my column. Today, John Royall, President and CEO for Gulf Publishing, cancelled my November column.

I have accordingly resigned as contributing editor.

Heading Out (Dave Summers) and I have been talking about the issues Arthur Berman raises for quite a while now. Most recently, Dave wrote a post called Shale Gas Estimates Perhaps Optimistic - An Interesting and Worrying Talk at ASPO.

So what are the issues involved?

This post reviews a paper by Nate Gagnon, Charles Hall and Lysle Brinker titled: “A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production,” published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Energies. The lead author was my colleague for two years at SUNY-ESF and the second author is currently my Ph.D. advisor and has published numerous guest posts here on The Oil Drum. See here for a list of previous posts relating to work by Dr. Charles Hall, and here to download a full-text PDF of this paper.

EROI of Global Oil and Gas Production

An update on the latest production numbers from the EIA along with graphs/charts of different oil production forecasts. 

World oil production (EIA Monthly) for crude oil + NGL. The median forecast is calculated from 15 models that are predicting a peak before 2020 (Bakhtiari, Smith, Staniford, Loglets, Shock model, GBM, ASPO-[70,58,45], Robelius Low/High, HSM,Duncan&Youngquist). 95% of the predictions  sees a production peak between 2008 and 2010 at 77.5 - 85.0 mbpd (The 95% forecast variability area in yellow is computed using a bootstrap technique). The magenta area is the 95% confidence interval for the population-based model. Click to Enlarge.