International Energy Agency chief says U.S. shale-oil and -gas boom will last only until 2025

Maria van der Hoeven

The oil-and-gas boom from deep, dense shales in the U.S. will only last until 2025, when it will flatten out and go down, and most drilling will shift to Asia, International Energy Agency chief executive Maria van der Hoeven told David Unger of The Christian Science Monitor. Her prediction for the end of the U.S. boom comes sooner than most other organizations have estimated.

"There’s a lot of shale gas in the world, but it’s not as easily accessible as it was in the United States," van der Hoeven told Unger. "The land ownership and the resource ownership go together here in the United States—the only country where that is the case. It’s also about having the right gas industry, the right knowledge, the right infrastructure, the water, the human skills, the geological information, etc. And geology in this part of the world—especially where the shale gas boom is—is quite different from Ukraine or Poland. You can learn from it, but it’s not a copy-and-paste." (Read more)

IEA had previously said the U.S. would lead the world in oil production for another 20 years. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that production at the Eagle Ford shale in Texas and the Bakken shale in North Dakota, two of the biggest producers in the U.S., could peak by 2021, before beginning a long, slow decline through 2040, Bobby Magill reports for Climate Central. (Read more)