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Big Data Will Keep the Shale Boom Rolling

Don’t believe the doomsayers proclaiming the end of the shale oil boom. It’s just getting more efficient.

• By Richard Martin on June 2, 2015

Why It Matters

Shale oil has helped turn the United States into a fossil fuel giant.
The number of active oil rigs in the United States continued to fall in May, as low prices pushed oil companies to temporarily shut down some of their production facilities. Since the end of May 2014, the U.S. rig count has fallen from 1,536 to 646, according to the energy analysis firm Platts—a 58 percent drop.

Low prices and plummeting rig counts have prompted a gusher of headlines claiming that the shale oil revolution, which by early this year boosted American oil production to nearly 10 million barrels a day, is grinding to a halt. The doomsayers, however, are missing a key parallel trend: lower prices are prompting unprecedented innovation in the oil fields, increasing production per well and slashing costs.

That’s the main reason that even as rig counts have fallen, total production has held steady or continued to rise. In the Eagle Ford, a major shale formation in South Texas, production in April was 22 percent higher than the same month in 2014, according to Platts.