MIT Says EIA Vastly Overstates Bakken Potential -- Bloomberg -- December 3, 2017

Memo to self: file this Bloomberg/MIT article under -- "garbage in, garbage out." Same with all the anthropogenic global warming studies.

The reader who sent me this article disagrees with the premise of the MIT study. I wholeheartedly agree. This is not a "study"; it's an op-ed piece.

The article begins:

Turns out, America’s decade-long shale boom might just end up being a little too good to be true.

Researchers at MIT have uncovered one potentially game-changing detail: a flaw in the Energy Department’s official forecast, which may vastly overstate oil and gas production in the years to come.

Why?

Because it's MIT's opinion that:  The culprit, they say, lies in the Energy Information Administration’s premise that better technology has been behind nearly all the recent output gains, and will continue to boost production for the foreseeable future. That’s not quite right. Instead, the research suggests increases have been largely due to something more mundane: low energy prices, which led drillers to focus on sweet spots where oil and gas are easiest to extract. [Sounds like Art Berman was their primary consultant for the study.]

“The EIA is assuming that productivity of individual wells will continue to rise as a result of improvements in technology,” said Justin B. Montgomery, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the study’s authors. “This compounds year after year, like interest, so the further out in the future the wells are drilled, the more that they are being overestimated.”

There is so much one could write about this but I simply don't have the time (nor the interest).

For me, this was an op-ed piece, not a study.

And, at the end of the day, it sounds like -- when one reads the article closely -- the MIT "researchers" don't understand what's going on in the Bakken. It's fortunate that there are folks who do understand what's going on in the Bakken, like me. LOL. 

But let's say the MIT "researchers" are correct: at the end of the day, does it matter? And if it matters, how does it matter? And if it does matter, how much does it matter?

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Technology: How Big Oil Is Transforming Shale

What perfect timing. This is almost a reply to the MIT "study." Here are some examples of the technology being deployed in on-shore shale plays. Well worth the read.