The Financial Times reports that “the shale boom is not a one-off event but a permanent revolution, with companies constantly pushing back the frontiers of the technology to cut costs and improve well productivity.”  

“’We are a gigantic innovation machine,’ says Greg Leveille, Conoco’s general manager for unconventional resources such as shale. ‘We put a lot of effort into trying to find the optimal combination of fracturing techniques.’”  

“Horizontal drilling, which opens up layers of resource-bearing shale, and hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, has raised US crude output by more than 65 per cent in the past six years, helped by historically high oil prices that have made the techniques commercially viable.”  

“The big question now is how much longer the US shale industry’s growth spurt will last.”