Remarkable finish for US oil & gas sector with strong production figures for 2023

Washington, Dec 31 (IANS) The US has produced more oil and natural gas than ever before even as government planners were trying a tectonic shift to other alternative greener sources of energy to adhere to the climate change protocol’s deadlines.

As shale wells showed a major uptick in per-well recoveries, the US is now producing more oil per day than any single nation has ever achieved.

“The fact that this has all been accomplished despite a domestic rig count that dropped by well over 20 per cent during the year,” according to Enverus.

Enverus is a single source platform for management, development and acquisition, within the entire energy value chain.

This makes it one of the most remarkable outcomes in the industry’s long history, media reports said.

“This outcome becomes even more remarkable as it comes amid a presidential administration (Joe Biden) whose leaders repeatedly stress their desire to end the industry within a decade to serve as a reminder of the industry’s extraordinary resilience,” an Oil & Gas expert wrote in Forbes.

As early as March 2021, the Forbes analyst noted: “The history of the oil and gas business in the US is that every time the ‘experts’ all line up to declare it to be dead, it finds a way to come roaring back.”

The analyst predicted that the drilling bonanza such as the one the US witnessed during the early days of the Eagle Ford Shale and the Permian Basin boom would continue its juggernaut despite the Covid-19 march.

Instead, it turned out to be a more stable period of rising production created by adoption of new technologies, process efficiencies, economies of scale, and strong financial discipline.

Some 33 months after the initial surge of Covid-19, the industry’s setting new production records and its corporate sector performance is remarkable way ahead of any other section in the financial markets.

It has boosted the oil and gas sector futures in the commodities markets strongly, experts opined.

“Smart money knows to never bet against this industry,” Tim Stewart, President of the US Oil & Gas Association, told Forbes: “We are going to be around a lot longer than any politician. Why is that? Because we produce wealth while they produce nothing.”

Those regulations and the processes the agencies implement to enforce them can lead to all manner of cost increases and delays in getting projects done. EPA is currently in the midst of rolling out heavy new methane regulations specifically targeting the natural gas business, the analyst wrote.

The Department of Interior just recently held its first significant lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico under Biden after years of delay, and really had to be forced by the federal courts to do so.

–IANS

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