Old oil and gas was always a refined sort of drug deal dressed up in respectable suits. You drilled an abyss in the ground, poured hundreds of millions into it, crossed yourself, and prayed for a money waterfall that would gush for decades. The majors were experts at this particular form of high-stakes theology, but it never changed the underlying nature of the gamble: you bet obscene amounts of capital on a hole in the earth and hoped fate didn’t laugh at you.
That reality created a very comfortable fortress. The entry costs were astronomical, the technical demands brutal, and the institutional competence required so steep that ordinary entrepreneurs didn’t even bother dreaming about it. If you didn’t possess the war chest, the project management machine, and the technological arsenal of the big boys, you had no business even standing near the field. Oil was a gentleman’s club with velvet ropes, cigar smoke, and a doorman who politely crushed your aspirations.
Then shale barged in and rewrote the rulebook. That was the real revolution. It didn’t just change production methods; it changed the sociology of the business. Oil and gas stopped being a quiet cartel of massive corporations nodding knowingly at each other across a polished table and became something far messier, far more democratic, and infinitely more interesting. Suddenly the wildcatter—the stubborn lunatic with grit, nerve, and enough brains to learn by failing forward—could actually matter.
Because shale is not primarily about worshipping gigantic megaprojects. It’s about iteration. It’s about trial and error, about getting better by drilling, learning, and drilling again. It’s about managing a field with the same patient pragmatism with which a farmer tends to his land—understanding that technique, timing, and relentless adaptation count as much as the cheque book. Don’t misunderstand me: money is still essential. But money now follows demonstrated competence; it doesn’t precede it as some divine prerequisite. Capital saw something sobering: shale lived through oil prices that would normally make OPEC producers clutch their pearls and scream.
So I stopped listening to the doom prophets. Every year they promise shale is about to collapse, and every year shale refuses the courtesy of dying. It’s not just here to stay; it’s rewriting the geopolitical script. The old oil aristocracy has been forced to share the table with rougher, scrappier cousins—and the world is not going back to the old order. Shale isn’t merely surviving. It is reshaping the map.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Permian-Peak-That-Isnt.html