Amount of oil recovered per foot drilled in the Permian Basin of Texas, the main U.S. shale formation, fell 15% from 2020 to 2023
By Sabrina Valle | Reuters
April 24, 2024 | Full story
Fracking, the extraction method that emerged in the mid-2000s, has become less efficient there. In the technique, water, sand and chemicals are injected at high pressure underground to release the trapped resources.
Two decades of drilling wells relatively close together, resulting in hundreds of thousands of wells, have interfered with underground pressure and made getting oil out of the ground more difficult.