Arthur Berman: "Shale Oil and the Slurping Sound"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 553 Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2023
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, Arthur Berman returns to unpack the complexity underpinning the oil trends of the last 75 years and what new data can tell us about availability in the coming years. After decades of declining oil production in the United States, the past decade of rising oil extraction has eased many worries about peak oil. But the past few years of continued growth have been obtained by using "a larger straw", merely delaying the inevitability of the depletion of a finite resource. Art presents recent data on well productivity in US shale plays indicating we are much closer to 'the slurping sound'. How does technology hide the declining availability of oil reserves, causing us to extract and use them faster without creating any new resources? Going beyond geology, how do geopolitics, finance, and social opinion affect oil availability? Where do we go when economically viable oil isn't available anymore - and will we have the prudence to make the cultural shifts necessary before we have no other options? Have we now passed 'peak oil'?
About Arthur Berman
Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 36 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qqTh2nBEcCs
Find out more, and show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/101-art-berman
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.0 | That's me. |
| 0:07.8 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the |
| 0:14.3 | environment, and our society. |
| 0:17.6 | Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. |
| 0:33.0 | I'd like to welcome my friend and colleague Art Berman back to the podcast. |
| 0:38.8 | I think this is his fifth appearance on the Great Simplification. |
| 0:42.5 | This is a very important and serious topic we discussed today, |
| 0:47.9 | which is the fact that shale oil responsible for most of the growth in world oil output in the last decade, |
| 0:57.9 | has been high-graded and cannibalized other wells. |
| 1:04.0 | And we just hit a new peak in U.S. production. |
| 1:08.4 | But Art will explain this is coming at a cost of massively declining well productivity, |
| 1:15.6 | where wells are producing 50% less per well than they were just three or four years ago, |
| 1:23.4 | and that this will manifest in both shale oil peaking and global oil peaking. |
| 1:31.2 | Art says that we have effectively used a larger straw and are much closer to that slurping sound |
| 1:40.0 | at the end of a milkshake. Of course, we're already a couple three million barrels below the all-time peak in the end of 2018. |
| 1:51.8 | And the world economy has continued to grow. |
| 1:54.9 | Stock markets are near all-time highs. |
| 1:58.1 | So a few million barrel decline in oil does not portend the end of civilization, |
| 2:04.9 | but it has major implications for coming decades if oil supply, even if we wanted it to grow, |
| 2:13.0 | is no longer able to grow and will be in effectively permanent decline starting about now. |
| 2:21.5 | Very important conversation. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nate Hagens, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nate Hagens and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.