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[Following up on last week’s Quote”] “Goldman Sachs doesn’t seem to be cluing in to the notion of field decline, which is relentless, and what x wells per y unit of time means to field production. Also their chart of vintaged decline curves as proof that well productivity is going up is highly misleading, as it depends on which portions of a field are examined. I looked at vintaged decline curves in Drilling Deeper; in some counties they are going up, in some going down, and in old plays like the Barnett they are down 18% on average since 2011. Vintaged decline curves for a whole play like the Bakken are going up slightly but that is as much a result of concentrating drilling in sweet spots as better technology. Geology matters – it always trumps tech in the final analysis.”
— David Hughes, president of Global Sustainability Research