By Sergey Manukov
It looks like America's shale revolution, which has doubled shale oil production over the past decade, is indeed coming to an end. Now the oil industry is no longer thinking about increasing production. Now all thoughts are that it should not decrease or decrease as slowly as possible. Even for this, they have to work harder and harder, because, according to the research company Enverus, the productivity of shale wells is declining very quickly. It is not surprising that the authors of another study draw a disappointing conclusion: one can forget about increasing oil production in the United States.
This conclusion is yet another confirmation of the truth that has long been known in the shale sector: shale wells produce the most oil in the first months of operation. Every day it is extracted less and less. Stormy at first streams of "black gold" quickly turn into streams. This feature, by the way, is one of the explanations for the fact that in the 2010s, oil companies tried in every possible way to increase production volumes, forgetting about shareholders and investing the lion's share of profits not in dividends, but in production.
It would seem that there is nothing wrong with the rapid decline in well productivity. It is enough to move to a new area and drill new wells with the same zeal, but the fact is that the number of such areas is decreasing even faster than production is falling. So now shale producers have to vary the intensity of production and develop new technologies that could at least briefly increase productivity. One of the most common technologies now is to increase the density of wells in the area, which is achieved by reducing the distance between wells.
“Summarizing, the shale treadmill is running faster and faster, making production growth even more difficult,” Dane Gregoris, head of Enverus Intelligence Research and author of the study, comments on the situation in the shale sector.
In the Permian Basin, America's largest oil field located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, the rate of well production decline in the Midland area after 2014 is about half a percent per year. And these are still quite tolerable indicators, because in the neighboring Delaware region it is declining much faster.
this article originally appeared at expert.ru