That shale is still standing is, frankly, a minor miracle that deserves more than a polite nod. Prices are nowhere near where the experts once insisted shale needed them to be in order to survive. WTI hovers somewhere between 55 and 60 dollars a barrel—in 2025 dollars, mind you. We haven’t even factored in what inflation has done to money since last decade. Adjust that number backward, and you’re probably looking at something equivalent to around forty 2010 dollars, maybe even less. And back then, the mere suggestion of oil at forty dollars was treated like a death sentence for shale. It was supposedly unworkable. Terminal. An experiment destined to expire under the weight of its own costs.
Shale was always filed under “expensive, fragile, temporary.” And yet here we are. The industry quietly did what people didn’t think it could do: it industrialized drilling in a way that fundamentally changed the economics. Gone are the days when one heroic borehole could make or break a company’s future—when the entire enterprise rested on a single wager drilled into the ground. Now it looks more like a disciplined production line than a casino table, and that changes things.
So imagine what happens if prices don’t stay here. Imagine if oil actually ventures back toward 100 dollars, the sort of number that historically made oil executives breathe like monks in enlightenment. If shale can hang on and even eke out a living at 55, what happens when the price doubles? What does that do to an industry everyone had already written the obituary for? My guess: the people who buried shale prematurely may soon find themselves explaining why the corpse is still walking—and possibly eating their lunch.