A ‘Major Second Wave’ of U.S. Fracking Is About to Be Unleashed Upon the World

by J. Worland, March 6, 2018 in Time


The widespread adoption of fracking in the U.S. opened billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to production and transformed the global energy sector in a matter of a few years. Now, a leading global energy agency says U.S. natural gas is about to do it again.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a new forecast this week that growth in U.S. oil production will cover 80% of new global demand for oil in the next three years. U.S. oil production is expected to increase nearly 30% to 17 million barrels a day by 2023 with much of that growth coming from oil produced through fracking in West Texas.

The Next Entrant in the Shale Revolution? OPEC’s Saudi Arabia

by W. Mahdi and B. Stanley, March 7, 2018 in Bloomberg


Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil exporter, is set to join the shale revolution with plans to start producing unconventional natural gas this month and exploit a deposit that could rival the Eagle Ford formation in Texas.

Saudi Arabia’s gas resources from shale and other alternative supplies are “huge,” Khalid Al Abdulqader, general manager of unconventional resources at Aramco, said Wednesday in Manama, Bahrain. Production at the kingdom’s North Arabia basin will start by the end of March and reach its target by the end of this year, he said, without giving details.