EIA, U-T Respond to Nature’s “Inaccurate and Distorted Reporting” on Shale

This week, a top U.S. Energy Information Administration‘s (EIA) official responded to a recent Nature article that “badly misconstrued” the facts and presents a “very misleading view” of American shale gas production and overall reserves. In a letter [pdf.], EIA’s deputy administrator Howard Gruenspecht underscores the fact that Nature’s story is based on “inaccurate and distorted reporting.” The article’s timing was somewhat ironic, too, given that EIA has just recently published various fact-based studies [read more here, here, here, here, and here] on expanded domestic oil and gas reserves and overall production.

Here are key takeaways from EIA’s letter to the publication’s editors:

• The article radically oversimplifies the matter at hand through its exclusive focus on the use of larger or smaller areas (county vs. square mile) in the EIA and BEG/UT studies. In fact, many other factors, including well-spacing, rates of technology improvement, drilling costs, price scenarios and share infrastructure across plays that can significantly affect future production.
• The article cites unpublished information obtained from EIA as if it was somehow hidden or sensational, despite the fact that this more disaggregated information is routinely made available upon request, with EIA staff having provided it 30 to 40 times since the publication of our 2014 projections.
• The article cites an October 2014 EIA staff working paper as a case in which “two EIA analysts acknowledge problems with the agency’s methods so far.” The characterization of efforts to evaluate new methods as evidence of problems with EIA methods is somewhat troublesome given that the pursuit of improved methods by EIA, by BEG/UT, and by researchers across broad areas of inquiry is a key part of the scientific process.
• The article inaccurately states that a study of international shale resources commissioned by EIA “does not state a range of uncertainty on its estimates, nor how much gas might be economical to extract.” That study, which was intended to place new information on shale resources into the public domain to spur a continuing process of ongoing improvement and refinement of knowledge, actually devotes a full chapter to methodology, lists the assumed risk factors for each formation, and explains why estimates of economically recoverable volumes are not provided.

In addition, top officials from the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) – whose researchers were a central focus of Nature’s article – wrote this in a letter [pdf.] to the publication’s editors:

• The “Battle of the Forecasts: Big Four Sources” figure attributes a graph to UT that we did not create. We provided the author with results from our peer-reviewed, published Barnett and Fayetteville studies. However, the Haynesville manuscripts are still in peer review and the Marcellus work is ongoing. On occasion, we show preliminary results at professional meetings of work from these as yet unpublished basins, but always with the caveat that it is not to be re-created or shared. To attempt to re-create our work without permission is unacceptable.

• Pitting the BEG against the EIA appears to be an effort to create “drama” instead of providing an objective and thorough scientific view. The numerous responses we have received since the release of the news feature substantiate our belief that Nature readers expect more. In our conversations with the author, we emphasized that we work collaboratively with the EIA and that we both consider future scenarios and perform sensitivity analyses to show how variations in input parameters affect production outlooks. The EIA result is, in fact, one possible outcome of our model. The author misleads readers by suggesting faults in the EIA results without providing discussion on the importance of input assumptions and output scenarios.

• The article pivots on quotes from Dr. Tad Patzek. Tad and his student, whose work focuses on individual well-decline forecasting and represents early-stage input for each studied basin, are valuable members of our team. However, Tad has not participated in the majority of the work in each basin, including Geologic Analysis, Well and Play Recovery Analysis, Well Economics, or the Production Outlook Studies.
• The feature includes no original scientific data or work, misrepresents the BEG study results, ignores the treatment of uncertainties and scenarios, and editorializes a very important global issue. These lapses are further compounded by Nature’s editorial pointing to the feature and making what we believe are unfounded, and seemingly biased, conclusions about the future of the U.S. natural gas supply.

For more fact-based information, please visit the MSC’s on-line Library.