Nearly four years of deadly stalemate on the Western Front slowly came to an end in 1918, as Allied armies pushed into Germany at enormous cost, leading the Central Powers to finally seek an armistice. In early 1917, British and French troops were launching futile offensives against German lines in Belgium and France, suffering greatly. The Central Powers were building their defensive capabilities, but launching limited offensives -- continuing a stalemate costing thousands of lives every month. Over the next year, a treaty between Russia and the Central Powers freed up German resources, but American troops began arriving in France by the thousands, and Allied command became more unified and effective. The tide began to turn decisively in July 1918, beginning with the Battle of Amiens, followed by the "Hundred Days Offensive", where Allies pushed German and Austro-Hungarian troops beyond the Hindenburg Line, forcing the Central Powers to seek a cease-fire. On November 11, 1918, all fighting ceased on the Western Front, after four years, and some eight million casualties. On this 100-year anniversary, I've gathered photographs of the Great War from dozens of collections, some digitized for the first time, to try to tell the story of the conflict, those caught up in it, and how much it affected the world.1A soldier of Company K, 110th Regt. Infantry (formerly 3rd and 10th Inf., Pennsylvania National Guard), just wounded, receiving first-aid treatment from a comrade. Varennes-en-Argonne, France, on September 26, 1918. (U.S. Army/U.S. National Archives)2London buses, shipped to Frace, being used to move up a division of Australian troops. Reninghelst. 2nd Division. (National Media Museum) #3German soldiers (rear) offer to surrender to French troops, seen from a listening post in a trench at Massiges, northeastern France.(Reuters/Collection Odette Carrez) #4A series of trenches, structures on fire, in a French war zone during World War I. (State Library of South Australia) #5A French soldier aiming an anti-aircraft machine gun from a trench at Perthes les Hurlus, eastern France. (Reuters/Collection Odette Carrez) #6(1 of 2) Street scene in Exermont. Beginning the night of September 30, 1918, the U.S. 1st Division advanced seven km down the Aire Valley in the face of German resistance, suffering 8,500 casualties. Photo taken while Exermont was still being shelled. (U.S. Army Signal Corps) #7(2 of 2) A moment after the preceding picture was taken, the warning screech of an incoming shell was heard, and the men scrambled for cover. (U.S. Army Signal Corps) #8The battles at Soissons. A captive balloon with its truck, equipped with a motor winch, in June of 1918.(National Archive/Official German Photograph of WWI) #9British soldier in a flooded dug-out, on the front lines, France. (National Library of Scotland/John Warwick Brooke) #10French soldiers stand in German trenches seized after being shelled on the Somme, northern France in 1916.(Reuters/Collection Odette Carrez) #11Lens, France, the devastated coal mining region of northern France, 220 coal pits rendered useless. (Library of Congress)#12Two Tanks knocked out of action near Tank Corner, Ypres Salient, October 1917. (Frank Hurley/State Library of New South Wales) #13In this aerial photo, a portion of an old reserve trench is visible near the Somme River, on the western front, in France. (AP Photo) #14(1 of 2) German storm troops race to occupy a newly-made mine crater near Ripent (Champagne).(National Archives/Official German Photograph) #15(2 of 2) Near Ripent (Champagne). Beginning of construction of defensive measures in a newly-occupied mine crater by German soldiers.(National Archives/Official German Photograph) #16Battery C, Sixth Field Artillery Regiment, 1st Division, from the U.S., in action on the front at Beaumont, France, on September 12, 1918.(AP Photo) #17A British firing squad prepares to execute a German spy somewhere in Great Britain, date unknown. (AP Photo) #18US Army 37-mm gun crew manning their weapon on September 26, 1918 during the World War I Meuse-Argonne (Maas-Argonne) Allied offensive, France. (AP Photo) #19Wounded British prisoner supported by two German soldiers, 1917. (Bibliotheque nationale de France) #20German troops cross a field, ca. 1918. (National Archive/Official German Photograph of WWI) #21Scene at the French town of Barastre during World War I. Shows a bridge over the river Selle, built by New Zealand engineers in 13 hours under shell fire. An ambulance and mounted troops are crossing the bridge. Photograph taken October 31, 1918.(Henry Armytage Sanders/National Library of New Zealand) #22Two Englishmen killed by gas near Kemmel. In April 1918, German forces shelled Armentieres, 15 kilometers south of Kemmel, with mustard gas. (Brett Butterworth) #23Trench position Chemin des Dames, May 1918. Two German soldiers (the closest one wearing a British sergeant's overcoat) move through a temporarily abandoned French trench (occupied by the British), collecting useful items of equipment. Dead English and German soldiers lie in the trench, the area littered with gear and weaponry from both sides. (Brett Butterworth) #24British soldier cleaning a rifle, Western Front. His growth of beard suggests he may have been continuously in the trenches for several days.(National Library of Scotland) #25Royal Air Force planes being loaded with munitions in France. (National Library of Scotland) #26Mother and child wearing gas masks, French countryside, 1918. (Bibliotheque nationale de France) #27Ruins in Reninghe, Belgium, 1916. (Bibliothwque nationale de France) #28Scene in Mons, Belgium when the Canadian army arrived in 1917 shortly before the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Crowds welcomed the Canadian soldiers who were piped through the streets by Canadian pipers. (AP Photo) #29German shells bursting on Canadian positions at Lens, France in June 1917. In the foreground, a Canadian gun pit is camouflaged to avoid destructive enemy fire. (Canadian War Museum) #30German soldiers walk past fallen British soldiers, following heavy street fighting in the village of Moreuil.(Der Weltkrieg im Bild/Upper Austrian Federal State Library) #31German dead on the Somme battlefield. (National Archives) #32Royal Army Medical Corps men search the packs of the British dead for letters and effects to be sent to relatives after the Battle of Guillemont, Somme, France, in September of 1916. (Nationaal Archief) #33Skulls and bones piled in a field during World War I. Photo from a collection by John McGrew, a member of the Photographic Section of the U,S, Army Fifth Corps Air Service, part of the American Expeditionary Forces. (San Diego Air and Space Museum) #34Panoramic view of almost totally destroyed town; crude sign reads, "this was Forges", possibly Forges-les-Eaux. (Library of Congress) #35Dead horses and a broken cart on Menin Road, troops in the distance, Ypres sector, Belgium, in 1917. (National Library of New Zealand) #36A shattered church in the ruins of Neuvilly becomes a temporary shelter for American wounded being treated by the 110th Sanitary Train, 4th Ambulance Corps. France, on September 20, 1918. (NARA/Sgt. J. A. Marshall/U.S. Army) #372nd Division Pioneers clearing the road near the Cloth Wall Ypres October, 1917. (Frank Hurley/State Library of New South Wales) #38A German machine gunner lies dead at his post in a trench near Hargicourt, in France on September 19th, 1918. From the original caption: "He had courageously fought to the last using his gun with deadly effect against the advancing Australian troops." (State Library of Victoria) #39A French officer stands near a cemetery with recent graves of soldiers killed on the front lines of World War One, at Saint-Jean-sur-Tourbe on the Champagne front, eastern France. (Reuters/Collection Odette Carrez) #40Toward the end of 1918, the Central Powers began to collapse. The Allies had pushed them out of France during the Hundred Days Offensive, and strikes, mutinies and desertion became rampant. An armistice was negotiated, and hostilities ended on November 11, 1918. Months of negotiation followed, leading to a final Peace Treaty. Here, Allied leaders and officials gather in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles for the signing of the peace Treaty of Versailles in France on June 28, 1919. The peace treaty mandate for Germany, negotiated during the Paris Peace Conference in January, is represented by Allied leaders French premier George Clemenceau, standing, center; U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, seated at left; Italian foreign minister Giorgio Sinnino; and British prime minister Lloyd George. (AP Photo) #41Soldiers in a field wave their helmets and cheer on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, location unknown. (AP Photo) #42Americans in the midst of the celebration on the Grand Boulevard on Armistice Day for World War I in Paris, France, on November 11, 1918.(AP Photo/U.S. Army Signal Corps) #43The announcing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, was the occasion for a monster celebration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Thousands massed on all sides of the replica of the Statue of Liberty on Broad Street, and cheered unceasingly. (NARA) #44The First Battalion of he 308th Infantry, the famous "Lost Battalion" of the 77th Division's Argonne campaign of the Great War, march up New York's Fifth Avenue just past the Arch of Victory during spring of 1919. (AP Photo) #45A Marine kisses a woman during a homecoming parade at the end of World War I, in 1919. (AP Photo)

• A century on and the scars of the Battle of the Somme are still vividly clear on the verdant French countryside

• 1st July marks 100 years since the WW1 battlefield saw France, Britain and the Commonwealth face Germany

• The largest monument on the Western Front is surrounded by visible trenches and craters that are relics of the war

A century on and the scars of the Battle of the Somme are still vividly clear.A 100-year-old trench, its edges now smoothed over by verdant overgrowth, snakes through a French meadow. Craters carved by bombs in the Battle of the Somme still pock the countryside. A century on, a bird's-eye view of the World War I battlegrounds conveys the unprecedented scale of what happened. 

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A drone flying overhead in La Boisselle, France, captured the World War I Lochnager Crater (above) caused by a mine blowing up on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916

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The deep trenches that scar the landscape mark the point where the Newfoundland Regiment launched their unsuccessful attack in 1916

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The Lochnagar crater (pictured) was created when miners from the 185th and 179th Tunnelling Company of the British Army's Royal Engineers Regiment detonated a 60,000lb mine under the German trenches. Captain James Young pressed the switch at 7.28am. When the dust settled the crater was occupied by a pals' battalion called the Grimsby Chums, but within hours the German artillery had started pounding it with shells 

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The Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Monument (above) in France stands in the grounds of the preserved World War One battlefield
Fields across a swathe of northern France became home to soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth, France and Germany as they faced off across the front in the summer of 1916.hare
On July 1, this eerie, bucolic landscape will host British royals, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and other dignitaries and youths from across Europe to commemorate the battle. 
The gathering comes at a poignant moment, as continental unity is under a new threat following Britain's vote to quit the 28-nation European Union.
Today grass covers the Lochnagar Crater, a dent in the earth that's 91 meters (299 feet) wide and 21 meters (69 feet) deep. It's a huge, unusual peace memorial near the French town of Ovillers-la-Boisselle. 

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As a memorial to World War One and the men that died the contours of the original trenches and crater holes have become a pathway

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The view from above: The ground has never quite recovered where thousands and thousands of men lost their lives for their country

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On the first day of the Battle almost 700 out of the 800 men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment were killed or wounded on this field in Beaumont-Hamel, France

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The Newfoundland Canadian soldiers fought for England on this spot, which still carries scars where bombs landed and trenches were dug
At Beaumont-Hamel, what looks like a ribbon of grassy knolls from the air is actually a preserved section of the trench line. Generations of British schoolchildren have come here to learn about the war.
Rows and rows of crosses and simple markers surround the towering brick Thiepval Memorial, honouring tens of thousands of British and South African forces who died in the Somme and have no known grave. 
They are among the battle's many victims. Six months of fighting left more than 400,000 soldiers dead or missing.

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The ripples in the landscape reflect the history of this war torn corner of Northern France where the Battle of the Somme took place 100 years ago  

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The 74-acre preserved battlefield memorialises where the Newfoundland Regiment launched the first attack of the 141-day Battle of the Somme

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The World War I Thiepval Monument in Thiepval, France, contains the names of more than 72,000 men of the United Kingdom and South Africa who died in the Somme

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Alongside the names of UK and South African miliatary men who died in the Somme lie French graves in recognition of the joint nature of the 1916 battle

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The drone captured the tranquillity that now surrounds the Thiepval Memorial, which is on the site of the bloodiest battle in human history

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Inside the memorial the names of missing men who lost their lives during the Battle of Somme are inscribed forever as a reminder of the acts committed on the field and their heroic legacy

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Rows and rows of graves honour the tens of thousands of British and South African forces who died in the Somme and have no known grave

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The World War I Munich Trench cemetery in Thiepval is one of many which dot the vast landscape, containing graves of soldiers who fell during the Battle of the Somme

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As the drone circles above the bucolic countryside, the monument stands proud as a reminder of the battle that was fought

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The World War I Ulster Tower Memorial in Thiepval was one of the first memorials on the Western Front. It commemorates those soldiers from Ulster who served in World War I

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The Ulster Tower Memorial has become a stopping point for those keen to remember and see the land where World War One was fought
Nearly four years of deadly stalemate on the Western Front slowly came to an end in 1918, as Allied armies pushed into Germany at enormous cost, leading the Central Powers to finally seek an armistice.

Saudis Have Lost the Oil War

This is the other “All in the Family” TV series

The humiliation of the Saudi ground military efforts against Yemen has become the gold standard of the all-for-show, palace guard military. Saudis in the ranks are there for the paycheck only, and no fighting spirit is to be found, even with an autopsy.

They abhor work, and fighting is definitely that, plus being something for slaves and suckers to perform. Hence we saw the sudden major influx of mercenary forces to protect the royal family from a continuing stream of body bags coming back from the Yemen war.

The PNAC material is something that Engdahl has mined endlessly as article filler, something he needs to throttle back on a bit. But it is made up for with his excellent material on how US shale oil production has remained strong, with the low oil prices that were supposed to trigger a deluge of bankruptcies and crashing production.

It’s a great story, worth the read for that material alone, as William does monitor the oil markets carefully, not only the geopolitical stuff but the nuts and bolts well counts, drilling times and daily productions. We need such people to take us behind the curtain for a peek now and then to combat the smoke and mirrors games that get run us all the time… Jim W. Dean ]

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Welcome to the flying dining room with lizard green chairs- Saudi style

– First published  …  June 01,  2016 –

Poor Saudi Arabia. They don’t realize it yet but they have lost their oil war. The war in its current phase began in September, 2014, when the dying King Abdullah and his Minister of Petroleum, Ali Al-Naimi, told US Secretary of State John Kerry they would gladly join Washington in plunging world oil prices.

Kerry with the late King Abdullah

It became clear that the main Saudi motive was to eliminate the new growing challenge to their control of world oil markets by forcing prices so low that the US shale oil industry would soon go bankrupt.

For Kerry and Washington the focus, of course, was to economically cripple Russia in the wake of new US sanctions by damaging their revenues from export of oil. Neither achieved their aim. Now, however, it’s clear that Saudi Arabia, which along with Russia is the world’s largest oil producer, is going down a dark road to ruin. Washington seems more than happy to cheer them on.

The long-term Washington strategy since at least 1992, well before September 11, 2001 and the Washington’s declaration of its War on Terror, has been by hook or by crook, by color revolution or outright invasion, to directly, with US “boots-on-the-ground,” militarily control the vast oil reserves and output of the major Arab OPEC oil countries. This is a long-standing institutional consensus, regardless who is President.

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Cheney: ‘Where the Prize Ultimately Lies’

Cheney 1998

To appreciate the long-term strategic planning behind today’s chaotic wars in the Middle East, there is no better person to look at than Dick Cheney and his statements as CEO of the then-world largest oilfield services company. In 1998, four years after becoming head of Halliburton, Cheney gave a speech to a group of Texas oilmen.

Cheney told the annual meeting of the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association in reference to finding oil abroad, “You’ve got to go where the oil is. I don’t think about it [political volatility] very much.”

During his first five years as CEO of Halliburton, Cheney took the company from annual revenues of $5.7 billion to $14.9 billion by 1999. Halliburton foreign oilfield operations went from 51% to almost 70% of revenues in that time.

Dick Cheney clearly looked at the global oil picture back then more than most. In September 1999 Cheney delivered a speech to the annual meeting of an elite group of international oilmen in London. One section is worth quoting at length:

“By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?

Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.”

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The PNAC Warplan

Members of “The PNAC Gallery”, Joshua Bolten, Karen Hughes, Condoleezza Rice, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby and Dick Cheney. [Source: David Bohrer / White House]

Now let’s follow that bouncing ball, sometimes called Dick Cheney, a bit further. In September 2000 Cheney signed his name before his selection as George W. Bush’s vice presidential running-mate, to an unusual think-tank report that became the de facto blueprint of US military and foreign policy to the present.

Another signer of that report was Don Rumsfeld, who would become Defense Secretary under the Cheney-Bush presidency (the order reflects the reality–w.e.)

The think-tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), was financed by the US military-industrial complex, supported by a gaggle of other Washington neo-conservative think tanks such as RAND.

The PNAC board also included neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz, later to be Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense; ‘Scooter Libby,’ later Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff.

It included Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan. Notably Victoria Nuland herself went on in 2001 to become Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy adviser. It included Cheney-Bush ambassador to US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and hapless presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

Zionist agents of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) planned and executed the annihilation of Iraq

Cheney’s PNAC report explicitly called on the future US President to remove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and militarily take control of the Middle East a full year before 911 gave the Cheney-Bush Administration the excuse Cheney needed to invade Iraq.

The PNAC report stated that its recommendations were based on the report in 1992 of then-Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney:

“In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”

At a time when Iran as a putative nuclear “threat” was not even on the map, PNAC advocated Ballistic Missile Defense: “DEVELOP AND DEPLOY GLOBAL MISSILE DEFENSES to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world. (emphasis added)

In the report Cheney’s cronies further noted that, “The military’s job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the “zones of democratic peace; (sic)” to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence…”

The Cheney PNAC document of 2000 went on:

“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.“

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The quote is worth reading at least twice

“Now you two are sure this is going to work, right?”

A year after the PNAC report was issued, then-General Wesley Clark, no peacenik to be sure, in a March 2007 speech before the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, told of a Pentagon discussion he had had shortly after the strikes of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center and Pentagon with someone he knew in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office.

Ten days after the 911 attacks, Clark was told by the former Pentagon associate, a general, that the Pentagon planned to invade Iraq. This was when Osama bin Laden, a bitter foe of the secular Baathist Socialist, Saddam, was being blamed for the terror attacks, and there was no 911 link to Iraq’s government.

Clark related his conversation that day with the general:

“We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.”

“I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

These were all wars, or attempted wars from the US for military control of the most abundant proven oil regions of the world, what Cheney in 1999 described as, “where the prize ultimately lies.”

Since that time, the US State Department and a host of government-tied NGO’s such as National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, Soros’ Open Society Foundations and others, along with the CIA, have launched the US-orchestrated (“lead from behind” is the current slogan) Arab Spring series of “democratic” regime coups across the Middle East, including Hillary Clinton’s war against Qaddafi in Libya, against Bashar al Assad in oil-and-gas-rich Syria, in Iraq yet again, Egypt and other oil or gas states of the Middle East, including an failed 2009 Color Revolution, the so-called “Green Revolution” in Iran.

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US Agenda in the Mideast

“Oh John, do you really think we can get a war started again?”

The Washington Pentagon and US State Department agendatoday in the Middle East has not varied one bit from that described by General Clark about his September 20 2001 Pentagon talk.

It has expanded, but the aim is the same: full US military control of the heart of world oil flows, the Persian Gulf and beyond. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said during the first oil shock of the early 1970’s (which he was instrumental in making happen), “If you control the oil, you control entire nations or groups of nations.”

Here we come to the September, 2014 Kerry-Abdullah deal. Washington ultimately has her eye on controlling the Saudi monarchy and its vast oil reserves, along with those of Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council US “allies.” Britain, whom Charles de Gaulle referred to as “perfidious Albion,” is not the only perfidious world power.

After major surprises in their 2014 strategy of killing Russia’s oil revenue with Saudi help, when their own booming oil shale industry began to face major company bankruptcies, Washington was forced to recalculate. When Russia made its surprise entry into Syria on invitation of her legitimately elected President, Assad, on September 30, 2015, Washington was forced again to recalculate.

Now the new plan seems to be to give Saudi Arabia “enough rope to hang herself” as that Soviet hangman, V. I. Lenin, was fond of saying.

When Prince Salman, the de facto Saudi King, fired the architect of Abdullah’s oil strategy to destroy US shale and regain world oil hegemony earlier this year and replaced him by ARAMCO chairman, Khalid Al-Falih, someone said to be more compliant with the 31-year-old erratic Prince Salman. Khalid immediately announced no plan to alter the low price high-production strategy of the Kingdom in order to kill the US shale rivals, despite mounting evidence the world oil market had undergone profound change since 2014.

It seems, however, that the US shale producers are far more resilient than the wily Prince Salman has calculated.

On April 26, in testimony before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s “Hearing to examine challenges and opportunities for oil and gas development in different price environments,” Suzanne Minter, Manager, Oil and Gas Consulting at Platts’ Analytics presented pretty interesting details that help explain why the volume of US shale oil has not yet collapsed despite a fall in global oil prices from around $103 a barrel in September 2014 to a range of $40-50 a barrel today.

Most shale projects were to have gone under at prices below $65 or thereabouts.

In her testimony, Minter described extraordinary technology changes that have allowed US shale oil producers to survive and more. She noted that since 2012 US oil production grew by 57% from 6.1 million barrels per day (mmb/d) to a peak of 9.7 MMB/d in April of 2015. Almost all was due to new shale oil output. That’s 3.6 million barrels of US shale oil a day, a huge volume for the world oil market, including Saudi Arabia, to deal with.

Minter described the effects of huge technology improvements using the Texas Eagle Ford Basin shale region as an example:

“Currently the Eagle Ford accounts for 13% of US crude production. In October, 2014 the rig count in the Eagle Ford peaked at 209 rigs. At that time, the average initial production (IP) rate for a well in the Eagle Ford was 436 barrels of crude per day and the average time it took to drill a well was 15 days. At that time, those 209 rigs, should they have remained in the basin, and continued to drill at that rate of one well every 15 days, would have ultimately produced 3.3 MMB/d of crude in the Eagle Ford by 2020.”

Then she describes the technology gains in production as well as time to drill and how many wells needed to get the same shale oil output. It’s impressive:

“In 2015 as producers cut their rig fleets, the rigs remaining now sit on the best known acreage. Resultantly, the average IP rate in the Eagle Ford increased by 50% to 662 barrels of crude per day and average drill times have fallen by 25% to 11 days. As a result, the current rig count of 49 in the Eagle Ford could theoretically hold production flat at the current estimated level of 1 MMb/d, so long as those 49 rigs stay in the basin through 2020 and continue to drill one well each every 11 days with an IP rate of 662 barrels each. This also means, that when recovery occurs, the Eagle Ford would only require 125 rigs to create the 3.3 MMB/d previously projected by 2020 that had once required 209 rigs to produce.”

US Marine near Rutbah, western Iraq, 2005

Minter continued, “The time and the rate in which this energy entered the market appears to have stressed the system in ways unimagined” making the US producer, “the marginal supplier and price setter into the global market.”

The Platts oil expert continued, “Drilled but uncompleted wells hold reserves that can be brought on line in a short period of time, thereby defining the concept of spare capacity. It is plausible to believe that US spare capacity may be close to rivaling OPEC’s current spare capacity. However, we believe that the prices needed to incentivize the US producer to complete their drilled but uncompleted wells may be much lower than global competitors believe or would like it to be. (emphasis added). Minter concluded, “Texas alone could introduce 1.25 MMB/d of oil into the global market and can do so in a short space of time – on average just 30 days. That’s more oil than the Saudis have threatened to flood the market with.”

So poor Prince Salman and his Royals may soon face an internal revolt by jealous and angry Royal rivals for destroying the finances of the once-super-rich Saudi Kingdom. The only fly in the US shale oil soup, however, is how long the shale oil bonanza can last. Shale oil reservoir depletion rates are significantly faster that with conventional wells.

Some estimate that shale volumes in the US will drop dramatically, despite the new technologies, within five or so years. But by then Washington’s foolish Pentagon planners hope to have locked the entire Persian Gulf into their military grip, including the foolish Saudis. Both sides have a mad agenda

Saudis Have Lost the Oil War