North America - Oil Transport By Rail

The end of the boom is in sight for America’s fracking companies.

Less than 3½ years after the shale revolution made the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer, companies in the oil fields of Texas, New Mexico and North Dakota have tapped many of their best wells.

If the largest shale drillers kept their output roughly flat, as they have during the pandemic, many could continue drilling profitable wells for a decade or two, according to a Wall Street Journal review of inventory data and analyses. If they boosted production 30% a year—the pre-pandemic growth rate in the Permian Basin, the country’s biggest oil field—they would run out of prime drilling locations in just a few years.

Gail: About the Keystone pipeline — you would be referring to Oil Spill Waiting to Happen? And the answer to our energy problems can’t be pumping more oil, unless we want to deed the families of the future a toxic, mega-warming planet. Let’s spend our money on wind and solar energy.

Bret: Right now Canadian energy is being shipped, often by train, and sometimes those trains derail and blow up.

Gail: Totally against trains derailing. Once again, less oil in general, however it’s transported.

.A weeklong shutdown of the Keystone oil pipeline is squeezing Gulf Coast refiners, who now have to replace hundreds of thousands of barrels that are no longer flowing through the system.

The 2,700-mile Keystone pipeline shut down Dec. 7 after a rupture in Kansas spilled an estimated 14,000 barrels of crude oil, said its operator TC Energy Corp.—the TRP -2.39%decrease; red down pointing triangle largest such reported leak in the line’s history. The spill is now one of the largest in the U.S. in more than a decade, and the company hasn’t disclosed what caused it or said when the pipeline would be fully operational.