Low Oil Price Drives New Shale Revolution

Easy money, super-sized frack jobs, and desperate drillers offering deep discounts to oil producers – all three have been credited for sustaining U.S. crude output during the worst price slump in six years. Now there appears to be a new factor in the mix: old vertical wells that can quickly be drilled, injected with water or fracked for a second time to increase production at low cost. The industry’s ability to find some workaround every time prices seem too low to keep pumping explains in part why 15 months into the downturn U.S. output stays near highs of around 9 million barrels a day and the government forecasts only modest declines through mid-2016. --Reuters, 15 September 2015