Shale oil drilling rebounds with crude price

Five years ago, the thought of $55-a-barrel oil would have given Piotr Galitzine heartburn. Now it’s keeping one of his steelpipe shops in Houston open 24/7 and fueling a flurry of orders.

It’s stoking business for National Oilwell Varco Inc. too, with the oil field-equipment giant for the first time in better than a decade selling more land-based than offshore gear. And it’s got Perry Taylor on the hunt for truckers to haul fracking sand.

Even at $80,000 a year, jobs are hard to fill. “It’s tough,” said the chief executive of Agility Energy Inc.

Crude is nowhere near its $100-plus highs of recent years, but drillers pounced after it steadily crept back up from the $26 bottom it sank to early last year.

As they tap more and more new wells, the rebound is spreading quickly, and powerfully, to the oil field-services outfits that were so hard hit during the collapse.

That services companies are hopping again with crude worth half what it was three years ago is thanks in large part to technological advances that help explorers to find more pockets of petroleum riches, and to drill faster and frack smarter.

That last bit is key in the shale formations that hold the most promising on-land pockets of oil and gas; tapping them requires fracturing the surrounding rock with injections of water, sand and chemicals.

To be sure, this boom could be fleeting, and some fields are rocking and rolling a lot more than others.

The burst of activity has helped drive U.S. oil output up at a faster rate than during the last surge, with an average 125,000 barrels a day added since September. Now exploration and production spending in the U.S. and Canada is on track to climb four times more than the worldwide average this year.

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY 2016 Fracking activity at shale oil fields like Permian Basin is on the rise as crude prices have rebounded from a year ago.