[K-Dog]

AGEOFTRANSFORMATION.ORG • 2026-02-20

When the boom hits the wall: A commercial reality check on fossil expansion

Gemini said  The 2025 UN Production Gap Report highlights a sharp disconnect between industry optimism and physical reality. While official projections suggest growth through 2050, actual data points to a looming structural decline.

Fossil fuels are entering a geological and financial "Red Queen" race.  More capital to extract less net energy from ever lower quality rock.  A crash is inevitable.

[K-Dog]

I'll throw some chum in the water.

PLANETCRITICAL.COM • 2026-02-19

The Copper Curtain | Art Berman

The USA, China, and the race to the bottom to control the West and the East.

ARTBERMAN.COM • 2026-02-17

Shell Names the Risks and Discounts Them to Zero

Shell describes the world we live in, models a different one, and doesn’t seem to give two fucks about the mismatch.

[RE]

What about Mother Russia?  How come the FSoA and China get to divide up the world without the Ruskies getting a piece?  Doesn't Vlad deserve a little respect here?  Is he the Rodney Dangerfield of the New World Order?

RE

[TDoS]

AGEOFTRANSFORMATION.ORG • 2026-02-20

When the boom hits the wall: A commercial reality check on fossil expansion

Gemini said  The 2025 UN Production Gap Report highlights a sharp disconnect between industry optimism and physical reality. While official projections suggest growth through 2050, actual data points to a looming structural decline.

Fossil fuels are entering a geological and financial "Red Queen" race.  More capital to extract less net energy from ever lower quality rock.  A crash is inevitable.

Do you think the UN knows they are recycling a claim from a discredited peak oil website of yore?

THEOILDRUM.COM • 2012-09-25

Is Shale Oil Production from Bakken Headed for a Run with “The Red Queen”?

The analysis uses actual production data from the North Dakota Industrial Commission as of July 2012 from what was found to be a representative selection of wells from operating companies and areas.

[TDoS]

I'll throw some chum in the water.

Indeed. World renowned energy expert. One of his incredibly long lasting quotes was claiming there wasn't much oil in US shales in 2011. In front of the Forrestal building...where the EIA is housed. In retaliation, Adam Siemenski (EIA Administrator) announced a few months later that US oil production growth had just recorded the highest level of growth in the countries history.

World renowned expert indeed.

I googled up his business address once, Labyrinth geosciences or some such. It was a house, I assume his, and Google labeled it a Mary Kay Cosmetics business. It struck me as a perfectly fitting sign of the importance of his consulting company compared to what was probably the wife's business.

[K-Dog]

Paying attention to where a consultant lived in 2011 is an interesting pastime, but it doesn't change the 2026 balance sheet. The UN report isn't 'recycling' an old Oil Drum blog post.  The report is looking at current EROEI (Energy Return on Investment) and the massive capital required just to maintain flat production in aging basins.

You can mock the messenger, but can you address the 'Red Queen' math? If we are spending more to get less, how does that support growth, and dreams of happy bunnies hopping in green meadows on a sunny day.

[RE]

One has to wonder where they expect the growth in demand to come from.  Doesn't look like South American consumption has much of an upward trend since its peak in 2014.



SA's problems generally come from a lack of credit.  As credit worthy customers, the continent has a notoriously bad history.

Europe does a little better with credit, at least in the north.  However, they have a real population problem moving forward.



For oil consumption to grow in Europe in the future, fewer people will have to consume more oil, which doesn't seem likely since  they just about are staying even with the current population.



Increasingly indebted economies with shrinking populations aren't very good potential consumers of a resource which is becoming increasingly expensive to extract.  I would not bet on demand rebounding anytime too soon.

RE

[TDoS]

Paying attention to where a consultant lived in 2011 is an interesting pastime, but it doesn't change the 2026 balance sheet.

Quite true. It just goes to credibility. Art has his own company, I believe the name is the same today, and after the fact (as I look back on the good ol' days) I have always wondered if he did anything OtHER than pontificate from a position of a geologist who doesn't apparently know that there was oil in North Dakota. Let alone the 3X larger amounts available in the Permian Basin right off to his west.

The UN report isn't 'recycling' an old Oil Drum blog post. 

I imagine they aren't. I can also imagine they know as little about the topic as the folks who wrote the TOD post. The instant someone pulls out the EROEI angle, I've got 90:1 odds in my favor that they are as uninformed as "Global Expert" Art.

The report is looking at current EROEI (Energy Return on Investment) and the massive capital required just to maintain flat production in aging basins.

Too bad the O&G industry has never, doesn't now, and never will measure success by that metric. It is a dead giveaway for folks not taking the subject seriously, or for someone who is purely academic. Charlie Hall for example. And Art. Art once asked the AAPG CORE committee to take up this angle and begin investigating it as part of their normal reserve based activities and analysis. The Chairman of the Committee stopped by my office one day, and asked me about it. I gave him my standard eye-roll, and short 5 minute speech that by this time was at least 5-10 years old (after all Charlie had been getting screwing this pooch since 1980....it wasn't like it was a new idea).

Academically oriented...and oftentimes economists....seemed to like the idea and lack the ability in the practical application side, or industry experience side, to know when to let a bad idea go.

Industry runs on IRR. The use of energy is in their of course....but not an assumed equivalence in value between different forms of it. That tends to screw this particular pooch.

You can mock the messenger, but can you address the 'Red Queen' math?

I mock the idea...the messengers are just suckers who fell for it.

And there is NO addressing the Red Queen issue. It has been a part of oil and gas development since shale gas was first produced in 1821 in NY...and after a few years the town using it to run their street lamps were like.....WHERE'D IT GO!".

The Red Queen issue is an absolutel given, as is peak oil. I have said this before, but people rarely listen once they dismiss a nay-sayer. The internet taught me that. In personal meetings, at conferences and in groups, it is far easier to demonstrate how the overall peaker game is flawed, but online people just dismiss you out of hand because they BELEIEVE.....a completely different personality type than those who can think and attempt to manuveur when their ideas are tested.

Peakers always hated their beliefs being tested, and dispatched so easily with history, indsutry specifics, facts, logic, critical thinking, etc etc.

Peak oil is a given. I say it all the time. Hubbert provided the math in 1956. It is how people calculate it that is a crock. EROEI is even one step farther away from predicting a reality, and all because of the economic value difference in BTUs in the real world.

Can't solve peak oil without a trifecta of sciences, and peak oilers rarely make it past the first.

If we are spending more to get less, how does that support growth, and dreams of happy bunnies hopping in green meadows on a sunny day.

We can spend more energy to get less. Particularly if the cost of the energy we spend (say 1 million BTUS at $0.02/btu) is less than the energy we get out 500,000 BTUS worth $0.05/btu. Peakers hate economics, because it is quite a froo-froo social science.

As the college professor used to say.....there is only physics, and the will of man. Without economics, you can't figure out peak oil. And you can't figure it out from the EROEI side without those economics either, otherwise you ar just starting out your excercise with "if we first suppose that 2+2 = oranges, then all that follows must be true".

The EROEI folks never tell you that last part is where their arguement disintegrates.

[K-Dog]

It looks looks like the lady in red is the real deal.  Dream your cornucopian dreams as you do, but the red queen runs.

TGS.COM • 2026-02-02

Rising Gas-Oil Ratios in Delaware Basin Oil Targets

Oil-targeted development in the Delaware Basin is increasingly challenged by rising gas–oil ratios, raising questions about fluid evolution and long-term oil yield across core benches.

Well Jumpin Jack Flash - who coulda knowd, a bubble point is reached where an oil well turns into a gas well.

It works like this. Initially, the gassy oil flows easily because the gas is dissolved in the oil under high pressure. But as the oil is pumped and the pressure drops, the gas begins to fizz out of the oil. Gas escaping from a freshly opened can of beer does the same thing. When a can is opened, pressure falls and the gas comes out. The same thing happens with gas dissolved in pressurized oil underground when pumping the oil reduces the pressure.

The oil is trapped within a rock matrix. Gas molecules move through the rock's pores much more easily than oil, flowing around the oil. As a result, the oil stops moving.

So, we may have finally reached peak bullshit.





Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

[TDoS]

It looks looks like the lady in red is the real deal.  Dream your cornucopian dreams as you do, but the red queen runs.

TGS.COM • 2026-02-02

Rising Gas-Oil Ratios in Delaware Basin Oil Targets

Oil-targeted development in the Delaware Basin is increasingly challenged by rising gas–oil ratios, raising questions about fluid evolution and long-term oil yield across core benches.

Well Jumpin Jack Flash - who coulda knowd, a bubble point is reached where an oil well turns into a gas well.

I'm always amazed when the mass media, or the internet, gets around to "discovering" the most basic principle of solution gas drive reservoirs.

For the record, I've got the individual well counts inside of the Permian that have changed from oil to gas, and when. For example the Spraberry formation wells transition far slower than the Wolfcamp wells. The Eagle Ford has always been a mix, and the Bakken has mostly always stayed oil, even across 2-1/2 decades now.

This fascination with GOR has poppped up a couple of time, over at POB one poster, a local operator in the Permian has been raging about it "gassing out" for at least all of this decade.

For an effect so predictable, I find it amusing that folks keep discovering it, attaching it to a doom argument, and pontificating. Well, when bell shaped curves don't work, there are always other things that can be abused to create a cool oil doomer story.

PS: I've also mapped the regions down to the resolution of about 10,000 acres to find the areas most likely to be effected, as well to well interference is also part of this effect. The more interference, the higher the liklihood of a well transitioning from oil to gas in shorter time spans.