Post Carbon Fellow David Hughes’ research was mentioned in this article on shale gas at the Economist.

From the article:

Some pessimists worry about the speed at which shale-bed wells run dry. David Hughes, a geologist at the Post Carbon Institute, a greenish think-tank, says the combination of gas’s low price and the heavy spending needed to keep it flowing casts doubt on whether the exploitable reserves of unconventional oil and gas are as big as they are fracked up to be.

Optimists argue that the fast decline rate has come as no surprise, and that the technology, and the industry’s experience in deploying it efficiently, are improving fast enough to mitigate much of the effect of weak prices. “Each stage of fracking is significantly evolving,” says Rick Grafton, an oil and gas veteran at Grafton Asset Management, an investment firm. Yet he concedes that while gas prices remain at historic lows, it will remain unattractive to invest in wells that produce only gas—as opposed to ones that produce oil or a mix of gas and “natural-gas liquids” (NGLs) such as butane and propane.

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