CERAWEEK: Technology to be integral part of shale development in US

Technology will continue to play a pivotal role in the US' multibillion-dollar shale plays, as operators focus on increasing efficiencies and lowering well-drilling and completion costs -- rather than adding new barrels -- even as output starts to plateau, operators said late March 24.

"If you look back at history, even in the Permian Basin, drilling and completion efficiencies have been 50% across the industry in the last five years," Nick Olds, executive vice president for the Lower 48 states at ConocoPhillips, said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston.

ConocoPhillips has achieved some 15% efficiency improvements in 2024 and 2025, with "more feet/day and more stages/day" and drilling longer laterals, Olds said.

As a rule of thumb, longer laterals -- along with multi-stage fracking -- significantly increase recoveries of tight shale resources, with multiple producers in the Permian Basin in southern Texas drilling over 4-mile laterals, operators said.

In 2023, in the Permian Basin, 60% of ConocoPhillips' wells were 2 miles or longer, Olds said, adding that today the company has 80% of its future inventory with 3- or 4-mile laterals, as "we know that improves the breakeven as we go forward."

"Beyond that, we look at surfactants [chemical additives that increase well recoveries] and real-time frac optimizations and the technology that's improving productivity," Olds said.

As it brings technology to the table, ConocoPhillips is expecting to see "modest growth in liquids" from its Permian assets in the Permian, CEO Ryan Lance said at the same conference March 24.

"We will see a couple of hundred thousand barrels of production, mostly NGLs," Lance said.

The technology the company is deploying is increasing year-over-year efficiencies by 10% to 15% on the drilling and completions side, Lance said, noting that over the past four to five years, ConocoPhillips' focus has primarily been on exploring its Tier 1 assets and on longer-cycle investments.

Varying approaches

"The big thing for Devon has been benchmarking" -- finding more granular data -- "and finding new data sets," John Raines, senior vice president for E&P asset management with Devon Energy, said at the same conference.

For leading Permian Basin producer ExxonMobil, the company has been working over the last five or six years on technology programs to improve recoveries, Bart Cahir, the company's senior vice president for upstream, said at the event.

"We have talked about proppants, and we are starting to move the dial in that space," Cahir said. "Recoveries will really start moving. We have 1.5 million acres with the deepest inventory [in the Permian], and we started cube development five/six years ago."

In late January, ExxonMobil reported a record output of 1.8 million b/d of oil equivalent from its "advantaged" assets in the Permian Basin in the last quarter of 2025.

Technology deployment continues to be ExxonMobil's primary focus, with lightweight proppant deployed during 2025 and roughly 25% of the wells, it said then.

For 2026, the expectation is for it to reach 50% of new wells by the end of this year, even as over 40 stackable technologies are in various stages of testing and deployment, the company said then.

Impact of current high prices

Current high oil prices, driven largely by the Middle East war, are unlikely to prompt the US' shale operators to bring new crude to market, operators said.

"We would need a very sustainable, long-term market to signal for us to increase activity levels," Olds said. "We will need to see the duration of that."

Lance said: "What's going to happen to the markets is a little bit difficult to assess. Clearly, the inventories will shrink, and multiple headwinds of oversupply and too much sitting on the market will still need to be addressed."

For its part, ExxonMobil will "always be focused on ruthless capital efficiency, and that's not going to change the cycle of predicting the cycle of predicting prices," Cahir said.

"We understand the value of our resources and have the flexibility of cycle times when you are doing cube developments."