Post Carbon Fellow David Hughes PCI report Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale was mentioned in this article on the EIA’s Monterey shale downgrade at Cleantech.

From the article:

Reuters has a good update on the latest EIA announcement, including confirmation that yes, the estimate dropped by 96 percent. Apparently some folks did not get the 2011 memo and had trouble believing what they were seeing.

For that matter, it seems that a critical analysis of the 2011 EIA report by the Post Carbon Institute sailed over everyone’s heads, too.

The Post Carbon report came out just last year. It took the EIA report to task for placing too much emphasis on the experience of Bakken and Eagle Ford shale operations. Post Carbon also notes that EIA failed to fully account for variations in Monterey shale formations, though to be fair EIA did place that aforementioned caveat emptor sticker on both of these points.

The Post Carbon report adds quite a bit of detail, for example this:

An analysis of every well producing from Monterey shale reservoirs reveals that average initial productivity is less than half of the typical horizontal and vertical shale wells assumed in the [EIA report], and less than a quarter of the “typical Elk Hills vertical shale well.”

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