Bakken Well Stats

Tight Oil could not Render OPEC Irrelevant

Steve Levine has a blog post discussing the idea that the "unfolding new age of fossil fuel abundance" will have profound effects on various things, including OPEC:

With prices dropping and competing supplies flowing from numerous new producers, OPEC will lose much relative influence, and may simply cease to be a pivotal economic player. "OPEC will descend into chaos as an organization," said John Hofmeister, former president of Shell USA. "They don't know now how much they are hated by the entire world. But they will find out as things unfold."

The key factor behind this kind of thinking is the rapid rise of production of oil from tight rocks like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas.  I haven't taken a strong position on what the limits of production are from these sources - it just isn't clear to me yet from the data that I have available.  But we could certainly place some limits on how much geopolitical impact this could have on OPEC.

Locating the US Oil Production Recovery