How long can Exxon and Chevron keep up the drilling?

[dgowin + 43]

Give that West Texas has defeated everybody else who has tried to squeeze some profit out of Midland Texas shale, I wonder how well Exxon and Chevron will do?

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

This comes as no surprise. At the end of the day you can’t change the reservoir rock and fluid properties - it just doesn’t want to flow.

You CAN change the wellbore area, thereby opening up more area of the rock that doesn’t really want to flow. This works for awhile, but eventually the tight rock feeding the new fractures/area comes into equilibrium and production drops like a rock (pun intended).

You can continue fracking when your production decreases to some threshold limit, or you can drill another well, to keep production up. This works until you run out of money.