Kunstler nails it

especially the shale oil/shale gas scam:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/forecast-2013-contraction-contagion-and-contradiction.html

Always sobering to recap what you already know but try to avoid thinking about.

from my mudlogging friend:

Long one, but good one. I think he's right about shale oil. A couple of years ago we were following 8 rigs in the Haynesville Shale, now only one, and that one is going into the grass once the current pad is done.



Shell is starting to back away from Kansas, and shift to West Texas. They're drilling wildcats, following some long-shot oil plays, in the hope of finding something that will keep them going for a few more years.



Maybe I'll keep my phoney baloney job for a few more years. They haven't figured out how to automate what I do ... look for miniscule traces of oil in increasingly tight formations.



In the 80's, they would have plugged and abandoned holes they're trying desperately to produce today.



Time to go Rape African Oil ......

...
Arthur Berman, an oil analyst with Labyrinth Consulting Services, says the promise of America's shale reserves have been vastly overstated.

His main argument: shale is too expensive to drill, and shale wells usually don't last longer than a couple of years.

Last year, he laid out his case at a gathering of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas in Austin Texas.

With his permission, we've reproduced it here.
...

Click to expand...

More: http://www.businessinsider.com/arthur-berman-shale-is-magical-thinking-2013-1?op=1

there are many guys reporting that current hoople has nothing to back it up in the solid numbers. I mean, ther is production boom going, and it is nothing to sneer at, but it is nowhere NEAR what is required, to replace declining "conventional" oil fields. In short, shale oil doesn't change the picture, from long term, and bigger picture point of view. Surely there will be folks who'll make a small fortune on it, but there's nothing that could reverse the global trends.

I personally respect what Chris Martenson have to say about it:
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/chris-martenson/really-really-big-picture

and this particular graph is telling everything one needs to know about the "shale oil/gas revolution":

The top line is showing how much oil demand would grow if it was going to expand at the usual historical rates. The gap between those two modeled states is 43 million barrels. To put that in a U.S. shale context, the EIA projects that the domestic shale plays might deliver as much as 3 million barrels per day by 2020, which is nothing to sneeze at, but even with that there's a projected 40 million bpd shortfall.

Click to expand...

"Energy independency by 2020"? "New Saudi Arabia"? Yeah, right... for as long as you only read the headlines, and don't look at the numbers, perhaps.