Quote from: RE on Feb 13, 2024, 06:11 PMEIA information is only as good as what the oil companies give them, and the agency serves the industry.

Good thing the information no one else can get is put to good use then. And  no, the EIA wasn't created to serve industry, but lawmakers and the markets with inventory and good energy information and analysis when Jimmy Carter realized he wasn't getting it, during the 1979 global peak oil.

Quote from: REThe information they publish gets regularly revised later, usually in the negative direction.

Or not. They haven't revised their peak oil estimate, and it is the ONLY one still standing from all the early 21sst century bloviating on the topic. And they do revise estimates on information as it happens. Like ALL US estimates of oil and gas produdction back in 2010...oops...sorry but those were almost all revised upwards. Until the US became the world's largest producer of crude oil anyway.

Quote from: RENow, let me try to explain this in classical terms.  If you assume that shale oil and tar sands are distributed out globally in similar proportion to the NA continent, there should be even more of this stuff under the dirt of 4 other continents than under this one.

No need to assume...why would you when the last evaluation was done almost a decade ago? It was going on even before that. Turns out Russia, they are maybe even better off than the US when it comes to the conventional oil from shales needing pumpjacks as K-Dog has previously mentioned.

Quote from: REThen, given both the energy majors and the TBTF Banks are multinational, if there was profit in extracting this oil, the banks would still be loaning out money to them to pump it up.  But they are not.  Why?

Russia is under sanctions and has plenty of dicrete accumulations. Just as the US produced most of its oil from discrete accumulations before getting around to more expensive shale oil, Russia can certainly do the same. It isn't as though anyone is up to US standards of oil development since inception.

As far as profitable, the EIA reference showed exactly how much is profitable. And might know far more...but the thing we know for certain? You have claimed things aren't profitable...do you have any data similar to the link I provided showing how much was available per unit price, or did you just say that without any information such as that I provided?