Over the past five years, U.S. shale production has seen strong and continuous gains in productivity as improvements were made in fracking technology and general know-how, but the most recent data for the Permian suggests that the enormous gains in productivity may have started to flatten out, Spencer Dale, BP’s Group chief economist, said Wednesday at the presentation of the UK supermajor’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy. U.S. tight oil and natural gas liquids (NGLs) production has surged by nearly 2 million bpd since October 2016, and started to increasingly offset OPEC’s production cuts as 2017 progressed, BP reckons. “Indeed, the pace of this second wave of growth in US tight oil seen over the past 18 months or so is comparable to the rapid growth seen in 2012-2014 – even though prices in the earlier period were materially higher,” Dale said in his speech. Yet, according to […]