[theluckycountry]

I have often pondered the advantage for a grid based consumer of buying a power wall or two

When I had my solar installed I asked the sparky about getting one for evening/overnight use and he told me it wasn't economical. The savings, amortized so to speak, over the life of the battery simply didn't add up. Electricity is cheap overnight, at least here. Mind you if you lived in Texas or those other places where they routinely jack the cost of electricity up insanely during times of peak demand, then I think it would serve you very well. Providing you can setup a switchover system based on the meter cost that is.

[AdamB]

It's not like they drill one or two wells that last for decades, they have to drill innumerable ones and then apply the fracturing sand and chemicals at high pressure to each one.

Yes, they do drill one or two wells. And the one or two more. Until they decide to stop or run out of rock.

And yes, wells I was completing with multi-stage slick water hydraulic fracturing in the 80's continue to produce to this day. Not quite half a century, but getting there soon. I bit amusing, that because wells decline quickly early, they must not last very long.

I guess what I'm saying is I would like to know how much of the conventional oil is used to extract and transport the fracked oil, it can't be negligible on the scale they have been doing it surely.

I never used a single barrel of any oil, conventional or otherwise, when completing, producing, or plugging shale wells. Gasoline, diesel, electricity, some natural gas from my gathering system to run burners, but not a drop of good ol' fashioned crude. What a quaint idea!

[Pops]

Yeah, I'm familiar with the waste in my car engine pops, it's the efficiency of the fracking plays I was wondering about.

The same outfit, Rystad, says LTO has a breakeven now as low as $45/bbl. My thought is it can't be all that bad at that price.

A quick search found this, from 2015 (which is about the latest I saw)

Brandt, Yeskoo, Vafi DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION OR DISTRIBUTION
15
Despite the above-noted pessimism about the sustainability of producing hydrocarbons
from the Bakken formation, our results suggest that energetic returns from the typical
Bakken well are higher than previous aggregate metrics for conventional oil production
operations. The resulting spread in net energy returns is wide, but even at the 25th
percentile, Bakken wells are in line with aggregate conventional oil production operations
with an (25th percentile NER of ~24 MJ/MJ). We therefore do not see evidence that
Bakken wells are unsustainable, unproductive or “subsidized” from a physical or
energetic basis. This evidence does not therefore support the general hypothesis that
shale oil drilling is energetically or physically unproductive, and is likely similar in many
respects to results from other shale plays.

Here's the picture:


So 30-ish. Better than I expected, definitely, and that includes results from the beginning of the party up to 7 years old. I didn't read it all but they mentioned that initially the breakeven price was very high partly because of the Boom atmosphere in ND, high labor, high royalties, new equipment etc. That all makes sense.

Rystad also downgraded US LTO 30 GB to 200- something GB on reduced expectations from shale

*Edit to clarify: 214GB is the total US remaining estimate, the downgrade appears to be mostly in shale LTO
.

[vtsnowedin]

I expect powerwall batteries to become popular with electric car owners that have solar power systems. This would allow the car that returns at days end to be charged from the battery on the wall instead of the grid. Eventually they may develop switching systems that would allow you to feed the grid some of your battery power during peak demand hours at a fair price credit to you.