http://rt.com/business/news/shale-gas-oil-usa-589/ “The second thing is that nobody thinks very much about is the decline rates shale reservoirs experience. Well, I’ve looked at this. The decline rates are incredibly high. In the Eagleford shale, which is supposed to be the mother of all shale oil plays, the annual decline rate is higher than 42%,” according to Bill Powers, author of the book “Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth.” “They’re going to have to drill hundreds, if not thousands of wells in the Eagleford shale every year to keep production flat. Just for one play, we’re talking about $10 or $12 billion a year just to replace supply. I add all these things up and it starts to approach the amount of money needed to bail out the banking industry,” Powers concluded. For more: http://oilprice.com/Interviews/Shale-Gas-Will-be-the-Next-Bubble-to-Pop-An-Interview-with-Arthur-Berman.html Arthur Berman:
The second thing that nobody thinks very much about is the decline rates shale reservoirs experience. Well, I’ve looked at this. The decline rates are incredibly high. In the Eagleford shale, which is supposed to be the mother of all shale oil plays, the annual decline rate is higher than 42%. They’re going to have to drill hundreds, almost 1000 wells in the Eagleford shale, every year, to keep production flat. Just for one play, we’re talking about $10 or $12 billion a year just to replace supply. I add all these things up and it starts to approach the amount of money needed to bail out the banking industry. Where is that money going to come from?
更加详细的岩页油气田的平均衰减率计算在下面的文章中：
Mark Anthony:
But one thing they could not hide is that in quarters after quarters, the producers have consistently spend several times higher on capital spending, than the revenue they take in. Producers continue to borrow more and more on debts in order to continue their well drilling programs.
Is a business profitable, if it continues to borrow more debts quarter after quarter, and it continue to spend several times more on capital spending, than the revenue it takes in? This is neither profitable, nor sustainable. I can see that when the banks get suspicious and stop lending money, then the shale industry will collapse.
As I stated many times. The shale gas and oil adventure is deeply un-profitable. The “cheap natural gas replacing coal” is a pipe dream. Investors should bet their money on the rebound of the coal sector, not on the false promise of shale gas or shale oil.
除了高衰减率，页岩油气田真正面临的问题是：页岩油气田的能源产出与能源投入的比率比普通的油气田要低很多（见下图）： 
这说明：随着普通化石能源的枯竭，使用非常规能源来替代人类的能源消耗缺口，要么带来居高不下的能源价格（拖累经济的发展），要么过度过快地消耗掉剩余的资源（为了获得跟以前相同量的能源需要投入更多的资源）。 现在，面对人类最大的问题是：一旦出现能源危机，整个人类如此多的人口该怎么维持下去呢？ 
【推荐阅读】The Long Emergency
by James Howard Kunstler (2006)
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Emergency-Converging-Catastrophes-Twenty-First/dp/0802142494 The Big Flatline
by Jeff Rubin (2012)
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Flatline-Oil-No-Growth-Economy/dp/0230342183 高油价的政治经济后果
http://blog.creaders.net/nWAY/user_blog_diary.php?did=94022 | 
