The Coming Revolution in America’s Shale Oil Fields

This paper explains how continued technological progress, particularly in big-data analytics, has the U.S. shale industry poised for another, longer boom.  John Shaw, chair of Harvard’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, recently observed: “It’s fair to say we’re not at the end of this [shale] era, we’re at the very beginning.”

He is precisely correct. In recent years, the technology deployed in America’s shale fields has advanced more rapidly than in any other segment of the energy industry. Shale 2.0 promises to ultimately yield break-even costs of $5–$20 per barrel—in the same range as Saudi Arabia’s vaunted low-cost fields.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_16.htm#.VYfUq_lViko