| | | Shale Oil’s Next Revolution Should Worry OPEC
November 20, 2025 at 4:30 AM UTC
By Javier Blas
Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is coauthor of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”
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Even after years of technological breakthroughs, the shale industry still leaves most of the oil underground. At best, American drillers siphon away 15% to 10% of what’s potentially available; the rest has remained thousands of feet under the surface. Until now.
The next phase of the revolution — call it shale 4.0 — is an engineering arms race to improve the so-called recovery factor. Increasing the ratio even by a single percentage point is a prize worth billions of dollars over the lifetime of thousands of wells in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Colorado. “The best place to find oil is where you already know you've got oil,” Chevron Corp. Chief Executive Officer Mike Wirth tells me in an interview in New York. “We know where the oil is. If we left 90% of the oil behind, it would be the first time in history that we didn't figure out how to do it.”
If engineers are successful, it would turn shale from a sprinter into a marathon runner. The impact won’t be another gusher, but a steady flow of barrels far longer into the future than the industry anticipated. And the more the US provides, the less other sources — above all, the OPEC+ cartel — can pump without undermining prices.
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COLUMN: Never underestimate the American (petroleum) engineer. Call it shale 4.0 — an arms race to squeeze more oil from existing wells.Today, American drillers recover, at best, 10-15% of the shale oil in place. That could soon change.
Increasing the ratio even by a single percentage point is a prize worth billions of dollars over the lifetime of thousands of wells in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Colorado.
“The best place to find oil is where you already know you've got oil,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth tells me in an interview in New York. “We know where the oil is. If we left 90% of the oil behind, it would be the first time in history that we didn't figure out how to do it.”
The industry will need sweat, imagination, time — and dollars — to deliver that prize. But I wouldn’t bet against success. As Kaes Van't Hof, the CEO of top shale company Diamondback Energy Inc., put it in a recent letter to his shareholders: “Never underestimate the American engineer.” |
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