Permian Basin: high oil price breathes new life into US shale

Permian Basin: high oil price breathes new life into US shale

The traffic has returned to highways that months ago were quiet. Stores are opening in previously boarded-up buildings. Restaurants that were dead are bustling again with diners. In downtown Midland — the epicentre of US oil production — an electric sign alternates between showing an American flag and the words: “It’s a great day to drill an oil well”. 

Almost two years after the pandemic triggered one of the worst oil price crashes in history — and 12 months after the inauguration of a president championing a transition away from fossil fuels — the heart of America’s oil industry is pumping more than ever before. And there is newfound optimism about the future of the industry despite the area’s vulnerability to changing oil prices.

Midland and neighbouring Odessa sit at the centre of the world’s largest producing oilfield, the Permian Basin, a sprawling geological array of crude-bearing shale rocks that stretches across West Texas and eastern New Mexico, covering an area larger than Britain.

The Permian is the engine behind US oil production and the driver of the shale revolution that transformed America into the world’s biggest producer. It accounts for roughly two out of every five barrels of crude pumped across the