Even predicting future oil output isn’t the precise science you’d expect. “We keep raising our forecasts, and we keep underestimating production,” Lejla Alic, an analyst with the International Energy Agency noted recently. Last year US production reached 7.4 million barrels a day, an increase over 2012 of 15.3 per cent. A jump that large hasn’t been seen since 1951. This year the US should produce 8.3 million barrels a day.
Take another indicator – the volumes of crude being moved by trains, often a mile long, from the shale fields to refineries and terminals. In all of 2008, train companies moved 9,500 wagons of the black stuff. Last year, 400,000 of them rumbled across America.
How long America’s shale boom will last is hard to forecast also.
In Texas, which on its own is set to increase production to 4 million barrels a day this year, the drilling peak still hasn’t been reached, says Mr Gallegos. But, he suggests, “in the end it’s not the oil fields or the wells that will determine where all this goes. It’s the politicians around the world who set the price and make the markets.” Increasingly, the decisions that matter will rest with the US, as it adjusts to its new status as a glut producer.A huge "thank you" to the reader sending me this link/story.
There are so many incredible story lines in this one article. I honestly think one could make a case that the US would be in a recession (if not a depression) if it were not for the shale revolution.
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For the truckers ... a little classical music ... 
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