What with all the rig additions, land deals, and low breakeven costs, the Permian basin has been the subject of much love from the oil industry as of late, and recently revised estimates are now showing that the Permian holds a whole lot more oil than previously thought. Horizontal drilling and technological breakthroughs of the past decade have made the U.S. shale industry a force to be reckoned with, but they have also prompted the U.S. Geological Survey to start re-assessing how much technically recoverable continuous (unconventional) oil and gas resources lie in today’s hottest shale play—the Permian. The latest USGS assessment , conducted in May, shows that the Spraberry Formation of the Midland Basin in the Permian holds technically recoverable resources of 4.2 billion barrels of oil and 3.1 trillion cubic feet of gas. The previous assessment , published in 2007, had put a mean estimate of 510 […]