The oil boom isn’t dead after all.

For the first time in five months, a rig in the Williston Basin, where North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation lies, sputtered back to life and started drilling for crude once again. And then one returned to the Permian Basin, the nation’s biggest oil play, field services contractor Baker Hughes Inc. said Friday.

Shale explorers including EOG Resources Inc. and Pioneer Natural Resources Co. say they’re preparing tobounce back from the deepest and most prolonged slowdown in U.S. oil drilling on record. The country has lost more than half its rigs since October, casualties of a 49 percent slide in crude prices during the last half of 2014. Futures rallied above $60 a barrel earlier this week, and a sudden return to oil fields would threaten to end this fragile recovery.

“You’re inviting a lot of pent-up supply to come back into the market -- not only do you have people drilling again, but you have this fracklog of over 4,000 uncompleted wells,” Harry Tchilinguirian, the head of commodity markets strategy at BNP Paribas SA in London, said by phone. “And then we’re in a situation where the market could easily go back into the mid- $50’s.”

David Fuller's view

US shale producers have plenty of oil and can turn on the taps whenever prices are profitable.  This will happen incrementally, with supplies increasing at higher levels and decreasing as prices decline.  When US companies are eventually allowed to export oil, they will increase production even more quickly while Brent prices remain above WTI.  These charts show that initial resistance has been encountered this week.

(See also Eoin’s comments below.)