Post Carbon Fellow David Hughes was quoted in this ‘Graph of the Day’ article on the collapse of the shale oil industry at REneweconomy.

From the article:

What the sudden drop in rig count suggests, Lewis says, is that the market is starting to re-appraise the shale-oil model, derided by some as some sort of giant “Ponzi” scheme, because of its reliance on capital recycling and new drilling to replace the wells that exhaust themselves within a year or two.

The significance of this is that predictions of the shale bubble may now come true. As David Hughes, the the Post Carbon Institute, wrote in his analysis “Drill, Baby, Drill”, there were always questions about how sustainable the shale revolution was going to be.

“First, shale gas and shale oil wells have proven to deplete quickly, the best fields have already been tapped, and no major new field discoveries are expected,” he wrote in 2013.