Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And oil was essentially nothing from shale, and now it's 63% of our oil comes from shale.
Less than two decades. And the oil molecule, it's a big, complicated, remember, complex carbon-hydrogen change. You can't get it out of those little holes very easy. Technology continued to evolve to allow the Bakken, the Eagle Ford, and West Texas Permian Basin to produce oil. This is revolutionary. Now look, so that's supply. Won't last forever, but this is important.
We've been producing those now for 20 years, some of those basins, and 10 years. The total amount of oil and gas in those basins is called the resource.
It's pretty accurate. My organization did those studies for 20 years, and others have too. But we did that resource estimates of all the big shale basins at UT Austin, Bureau of Economic Geology. You can estimate what's in place. The reserve, and this is where language gets kind of funny, is what you can produce with today's technology at today's price. Price changes, reserves change.
You know, I can produce more at a higher price. The price goes down. So the reserves change. And then you got your production. Of all those tanks, those resources, we've only produced about 5%. in those 20 years. There's 95% still down there. It's hard to get out.
I do, I do, yeah. Yeah, so all those basins added up in the US is about 500 billion barrels equivalent. That's a lot, big numbers. The oil sands in Alberta, I don't know those numbers precisely, but they're big numbers, too. They're in that range, but very hard to get out.
Completely different technology. Our first film, Switch.
And if you're allowed, and the environmental regulations allow it. Right. Because the cool part about, we featured those in our first film, the stuff at the surface that they're mining... And for your viewer, I mean, these are conventional oil reservoir that's been impacted by surface waters and the oil, all the light stuff came off. So it's really heavy kind of tar-like oil.
So for your listeners, that's what we're talking about here. So you got to move tar out of rock. Not easy. You can mine it at the surface. That's pretty environmentally destructive, but that's 20%. 80% is below the surface. And what they do is they drill wells down in and they inject steam at high pressures because when you put heat on tar, it becomes a liquid and kind of a sludge.
And then they flow this sludge in and they add more natural gas and other things and they make it into an oil again and move it away. So they're literally taking... tar or heavy oil sands away that way. Huge resource.
No, it's not. And here's the biggest, here's kind of the mic drop on it all. Okay. The U.S. and Canada and Argentina are really the only ones producing oil and gas from shale today. We're not the only ones that have it.
But the big ones, because these are the source rocks, it's the kitchen. This is where the oil was made millions of years ago. and then leaked off into these conventional reservoirs with time, heat and pressure and time, up comes the oil. Those are the source rocks, that's what they're called. Mer de huile in French, you know, the mother of oil, sits down there.
Where you find these conventional oil and gas fields, like we have in the Middle East and Russia and South America, et cetera, there are mature source rocks leaking oil and gas. Some of the most mature and biggest source rocks in the world are in, you guessed it, the Middle East and Russia. They've been quietly testing them, quietly seeing, hey, let's learn that technology. How do we get ready?
Because it's more expensive.
And they still have these conventional reservoirs, a lot of oil and gas in the Middle East, a lot of gas in Russia, some oil, big basins.
Yes.
Well, here we've literally created a production curve that is higher than it was in the 70s. King Hubbard, a famous guy that worked with my dad, Shell, predicted peak oil in the US in 73. And he was right until we turned it around with Shell. And now we're producing more oil than we ever have. So it will be more than they've produced so far in each of those regions, at least.
They're quietly testing them. Why? And guess who was against fracking? If you chase the money back in the early 2000s, the anti-fracking movement, you chase it to Russia and the Middle East, and it's not even that hard to track it.
I wrote a piece about that. I mean, like, oh, no, the U.S. is coming back. All of a sudden, OPEC doesn't control. It was a wild time.
Yeah, and it lights on fire and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Documentary films.
Showing 121–140 of 207 · page 7 of 11
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