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well over 400,000 barrels of oil daily. As of early 2012, it was conven-
tional wisdom among industry analysts that the state could produce as
much as a million barrels a day by the decade's close.
And the Bakken oil i eld, though the biggest, was far from the only
tight oil story. A similar upsurge was under way in Texas. In 2007, the
Eagle Ford shale, which covers ten to twenty thousand square miles
between the Mexican border and East Texas, produced a measly 2.99
barrels of oil a day.
10
(h at isn't 2.99 million; it's 2.99.) By 2011, it
was yielding one hundred thousand barrels every twenty-four hours, up
eightfold just from the previous year. In early 2012, analysts projected
that the Eagle Ford could quickly catch up to the Bakken and also reach
a million barrels a day of production before the decade is out.
11
By
September of that year, the Eagle Ford had combined with another
oil-producing part of Texas, known as the Permian Basin, to deliver a
gain of half a million barrels a day in the span of just a year.
12
Indeed North American geology means that tight oil is found all
over the United States. To date, the most common source has been
shale, which explains why tight oil is ot en confusingly referred to as
shale oil. About four hundred million years ago, mud and organic mat-
ter set led across bot oms of large water basins covering much of what
is today the United States. h e thin layers of material from plants and
animals, together with silt and mud, added up. Over millions of years,
the resulting pressure formed the sedimentary rock known as shale.
13
Trapped in the rock, the organic materials turned into chains of carbon
and hydrogen atoms—oil and gas—and began to turn the shale black.
14
Not every shale deposit is ripe for production. Some, buried too deep,
found their oil and gas cooked of by intense pressure, while others,
too shallow, never found their contents converted to petroleum at all.
In much of the country, though, the shale was just right.
h is, along with an abundance of other geologies in which oil was
trapped, means that discovery of new technologies to unlock tight oil
hold the potential to transform the landscape of U.S. oil. As recently as
2008, total crude oil production from the entire lower forty-eight states
was 4.3 million barrels a day.
15
By early 2012, a team of Citigroup ana-
lysts would tally nearly four million barrels a day of tight oil production
that could be realized by the end of this decade. h
e possible sources
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