22 March

Shale Oil was mined near Lithgow for about 10 years, from 1940-1950. Shale oil is known as ‘tight’ oil in the oil industry, tough to extract and usually uneconomic. The extraction process uses a now famous method - ‘fracking’. For the past 10-20 years, world oil prices have been kept lower by the US reactivating its oil shale industry. The thing with oil shale though is that the wells quickly run dry, as happened at Glen Davis, and is now happening in the US, where production is about to fall off a cliff. The reason fracking has become such a big news item is that the oil and gas industry has been forced to use it, because all the easy resources are now gone. As I posted the other day, by 2050 half the energy extracted from these wells will be needed, just to do the extraction. The industry is in terminal decline.