The worst oil market in decades would be hard to spot in West Texas, where two-lane county roads are still jammed with trucks and energy companies are on the prowl for deals.

The Permian Basin, the biggest of the shale-oil regions that ignited the U.S. energy boom, is also the only one where production is increasing even as drillers idle more than half the rigs in the country during the longest price slump since the 1980s.

And:

The Permian’s multiple layers of oil- and gas-soaked rocks, in some places stacked 5,000 feet thick, contain plenty of places to drill that will yield 30 percent to 40 percent rates of return with crude prices as low as $40 a barrel, Laird Dyer, a Royal Dutch Shell Plc energy analyst, said at a conference in Toronto Nov. 10.

A single layer in the Permian, the Spraberry, probably holds 75 billion barrels of recoverable oil, Dyer said. That’s enough to supply the entire world for more than two years.

A single layer in the Permian, the Spraberry, probably holds 75 billion barrels of recoverable oil, Dyer said. That’s enough to supply the entire world for more than two years.

“Somebody described it to me once as a tiramisu, it’s just lots of layers of beauty over there,” Drilling Info’s Gilmer said. “Everyone recognizes that the Permian Basin is by far the richest land on earth. The only thing holding it back from more and more is the engineering, and I think this is an industry that’s really proven that the engineering gets better every year.”

David Fuller's view

The Permian Basin, plus US engineering skills developed entirely by private industry, are currently the single biggest factors holding back the Saudi’s misinformed attempt to close the fracking industry. 

Saudi Arabia’s new government led by King Salman inherited this energy war, launched ostensibly to retain the country’s most important clients such as China.  However, its primary effort, I maintain, has been to force other producers, starting with the US and Russia, to cut supplies. 

That has not worked, at least not yet.  Therefore, oil exporters face growing deficits.  The current battle of overproduction, while it continues, would be less of a Pyrrhic victory if the Saudis declared that the policy had ‘succeeded’, and persuaded other OPEC suppliers to join them in reducing production.  That would probably lift Brent Crude Oil to the $70 to $80 region.