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The resulting jump in productivity per well has been dramatic, Brown said. The number of barrels of oil produced per foot of drilling has increased 200 percent since 2014, with much of that progress coming in the last three years.
Another factor in productivity has been wells that were drilled, but not completed, before the 2020 oil crash. Those drilled but uncompleted wells sat idle for years until the price of oil began to climb, said Andy Lipow, president of the Houston-based Lipow Oil Associates analysis firm.
“The first thing to come back was the wells that you’d already spent a bunch of money and needed very little capital to bring them online,” he said.
The inventory of those wells dropped from a high of 8,800 in 2020 to 4,8283 uncompleted wells in August 2022, according to the EIA.
However, Biden administration policies are still important for the industry, according to observers. They are not providing enough certainty for the industry to continue producing at high levels in the longer term, said Meyer with API. The organization has released statements saying that changes to federal environmental review processes, pending oil and gas lease sales on federal land, and agencies’ rulemaking on the Inflation Reduction Act have made companies in the sector weary.
“We need long-term certainty to make these investments,” he said. “And right now, we just don’t have that.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement, Interior Department spokesperson Melissa Schwartz said the near-record production levels reflect not only that the industry has enough security to make investment decisions but also the Biden administration’s work to “encourage responsible production on existing lands.”
“There are millions of acres of leased, non-producing acres of federal land for oil and gas development,” Schwartz wrote. “There are similarly thousands of approved permits that industry is letting sit, undeveloped.”