Beetaloo or bust: the route to commercial success for an Australian shale play, page-67

I was thinking the same. Peak US gas.


The US is set to shift from a prolonged period of acute oversupply to a structural deficit of historic proportions. Although inventories remain high, our models predict they will draw to dangerous levels much sooner than anyone believes possible. Given this backdrop, it is unfathomable to us that US natural gas should trade at a record discount to its energy-equivalent price, even considering two consecutive mild winters. Investors should take note. In many respects, the current natural gas market represents the perfect storm: dry gas production is faltering just as demand is set to surge. We have warned for several years that shale growth would slow. Our neural network models indicated that, although immense, the shale basins were not infinite. The Barnett and Fayetteville were the first two shale gas basins developed in the middle 2000s. Each field ramped up sharply before unexpectedly plateauing and declining by over 50%. We concluded that both fields peaked precisely once half their recoverable reserves had been produced, just as Hubbert’s theories predicted. By applying these same principles to the Marcellus, Haynesville, and Permian (collectively 75% of total shale gas production ) we warned growth would soon begin to slow before production rolled over entirely in 2025. It appears we were too conservative; US gas supply has likely peaked already.