Eventually, production levels will slow because there’s just less of the stuff available … The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that oil produced from U.S. shales, “tight sands,” and the deep-water Gulf of Mexico will peak at about 6.8 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. It will then decline to 4.8 million barrels per day by 2030 and 4.3 million barrels by 2040 due to depleting reserves. (A tight-oil deposit is one that can’t produce economically without the benefit of fracking and horizontal drilling.)
While there are known tight-oil and shale deposits throughout the world, total production from these formations will only result in a temporary increase in global production capacity as the price rises to make drilling and completing these expensive wells economic. However, another more immediate factor affecting tight oil and shale oil development will be the need for vast amounts of water in the fracking process . Unconventional wells today use millions of gallons of water in fracking. Between 2000 and 2014, the average amount of water used to frack a horizontal natural gas well increased from 177,000 gallons to 5.1 million gallons per well.
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