The Shale Revolution: When the Basin Came Back

By the late nineteen eighties and into the nineties, geologists and petroleum engineers in the Permian Basin had largely concluded that the conventional oil in the region had been found. The easy reservoirs, the ones that gave up their oil under natural pressure or with simple pumping, had been producing for decades. The basin was considered mature. Production was declining. The workforce was contracting.

What the geological surveys had identified but could not yet extract was a much larger quantity of oil locked in the rock itself, shale and tight sandstone formations that held hydrocarbons in pores too small to produce without assistance. The technology to change that situation was being developed elsewhere in Texas, in the Barnett Shale north of Fort Worth, where engineers were experimenting with hydraulic fracturing combined with horizontal drilling. The technique involved drilling a well vertically and then turning the drill bit to travel horizontally through the target rock formation for a mile or more, then pumping high-pressure fluid to crack the rock and release the oil.

The results reached the Permian Basin in force in the two thousand tens. Production that had been measured in hundreds of thousands of barrels per day climbed back toward the levels of the nineteen seventies and then surpassed them. By two thousand nineteen, the Permian Basin was averaging about four point two million barrels of oil per day, a total that rivaled many OPEC member nations.

The workforce returned. The hotels filled. The rents rose to levels that the existing population, many of whom had stayed through the bust, could no longer afford. The infrastructure of the towns, built for a much smaller population, strained under demand. The basin that was considered played out had become the most productive oil field in the history of the United States.