From Watts Up With That?
Guest “This bunny just keeps going and going!” by David Middleton
June 2, 2025
Tight oil production in Permian drives growth in onshore U.S. Lower 48 states production
Note: L48=U.S. Lower 48 states
Onshore crude oil production in the U.S. Lower 48 states (L48) has more than tripled since January 2010, driven by tight oil production growth in the Permian region. Onshore crude oil production is made up of both legacy oil production, primarily from vertically drilled wells, and newer tight oil production, primarily from horizontally drilled wells.
Legacy production decreased from 2.6 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2010 to 2.1 million b/d in 2024. Over the same period, tight oil production increased from 0.8 million b/d to 8.9 million b/d, accounting for 81% of total onshore L48 oil production in 2024. The Permian accounted for 65% of all tight oil production growth and 51% of L48 oil production in 2024.
Since 2010, U.S. tight oil production within and outside of the Permian has generally grown. Tight oil production from non-Permian plays decreased from 2015 to 2017 in a period of low oil prices. At the beginning of 2020, tight oil production from the Permian region was essentially equal to tight oil production from all other producing regions in the United States. Permian and non-Permian oil production both fell significantly in response to crude oil prices falling below $50 per barrel (b) related to the COVID-19 pandemic, with production reaching annual lows in May 2020. After 2020, however, production in the Permian increased at a faster rate than production outside the Permian.
Note: WTI=West Texas Intermediate
Tight oil production in the Permian began growing again in 2021 as crude oil prices rose, but production in the non-Permian remained low. After 2020, Permian tight oil production grew at a slower rate than 2017–19, but by December 2024, Permian production reached 5.6 million b/d, up 45% compared with 2020. In contrast, non-Permian tight oil production decreased by 14.9% (0.6 million b/d) based on the annual average oil volumes from 2020 to 2024.
Within the Permian region, the Wolfcamp, Bone Spring, and Spraberry plays produce most of the tight oil, accounting for 99% of Permian tight oil production in 2024. The Wolfcamp play, the largest of the three, has driven growth in the Permian and produced 3.4 million b/d of tight oil in 2024, which was equivalent to production from all other non-Permian tight oil plays combined. The Spraberry and Bone Spring combined produced an average 2.1 million b/d in 2024.
Principal contributor: Troy Cook
Tags: crude oil, oil/petroleum, production/supply, Permian
From 2000 through 2024 the cumulative production from the Permian Basin totaled been 14 billion barrels of crude oil and nearly 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In 2024, the basin accounted for about 2 billion barrels of oil and nearly 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas production.
Cue Forrest Gump…
Let’s look at the Wolfcamp Formation
At 3.4 million barrels per day, The Wolfcamp Formation of the Permian Basin is, by far, the largest single contributor to US oil production.
The Wolfcamp Formation was first identified in outcrops in the Wolf Camp Hills, south of the Glass Mountains, north of Marathon, Texas over 100 years ago.
Centennial of the Wolfcamp Formation
April 2017 Richard Bain
This year marks a centennial celebration for petroleum geologists in more ways than one. A few months after the founding of AAPG in early 1917, the first description of the Wolfcamp Formation was published in the University of Texas Bulletin No. 1753 titled “Notes on the Geology of the Glass Mountains” by J. A. Udden, on Sept. 20, 1917.
Johan August Udden described a series of outcrops in the Wolf Camp Hills that lie at the southern end of the Glass Mountains, approximately 12 miles northeast of the town of Marathon in Brewster County, Texas.
[…]
The Wolfcamp Formation is present in all three tectonic provinces of the Permian Basin.
- Delaware Basin
- Central Basin Platform
- Midland Basin
The Wolfcamp is the lowermost and oldest Permian series/formation in the Permian Basin.
The organic-rich “shale” was deposited in an semi-enclosed “epicontinental” sea approximately 290 million years ago.
Regional stratigraphy and lithology of the Wolfcamp formation
Wolfcamp formation deposited during late Pennsylvanian through late Wolfcampian time is distributed across the entire Permian Basin. The Wolfcamp formation is a complex unit consisting mostly of organic-rich shale and argillaceous carbonates intervals near the basin edges. Depth, thickness, and lithology vary significantly across the basin extent. Depositional and diagenetic processes control this formation heterogeneity. Stratigraphically, the Wolfcamp is a stacked play with four intervals, designated topdown as the A, B, C, and D benches (Gaswirth, 2017). Porosity of the Wolfcamp Formation varies between 2.0% and 12.0% and averages 6.0%; however, average permeability is as low as 10 millidarcies3, which requires multistage hydraulic fracturing.
Throughout most of the history of the Permian Basin, the organic-rich Wolfcamp was considered one of the primary source rocks for conventional oil & gas reservoirs in the basin. The Wolfcamp was not thought to be a viable reservoir rock due to its low permeability.
The advent of horizontal drilling, coupled with multistage hydraulic fracking since 2010, rapidly led to the Wolf camp becoming the dominant oil reservoir in the United States. In 2016, the USGS estimated a technically recoverable resource of “20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids” in the Midland Basin alone. Since the USGS assessment, the Permian Basin has yielded 11.6 billion barrels of oil and 33.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, with the lion’ share coming from the Wolfcamp… And production is still on the rise.
For Further Reading
Permian Basin Wolfcamp Shale Play Geology review (EIA October 2018)
Addendum
Permian
Lower 48 Tight Oil Plays
Austin Chalk
The Austin Chalk and Tokio and Eutaw Formations of the Gulf Coast Basin contain a mean of 6.9 billion barrels of oil and 41.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas according to a new assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Bakken
The USGS has completed an oil and gas estimate for the Bakken and Three Forks Formations in the Williston Basin of Montana and North Dakota. The estimate includes 4.3 billion barrels of unconventional oil and 4.9 trillion cubic feet of unconventional natural gas in the two formations. This assessment updates the 2013 USGS assessment of the Williston Basin.
Eagle Ford
The Eagle Ford Group of Texas contains estimated means of 8.5 billion barrels of oil, 66 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 1.9 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to a new assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This estimate consists of undiscovered, technically recoverable resources in continuous accumulations.
Mississippian
The Mississippian Lime (ML), a carbonate formation that primarily produces oil, underlies a large portion of Northern Oklahoma and Southern Kansas. The formation has been drilled vertically since the 1940s, with its first horizontal well drilled in 2007. The play lies at a fairly shallow depth (4,000-7,000 feet), and it features different drilling characteristics from shale and tight sands formations. Carbonate plays tend to be more permeable, which reduces the amount of drilling horsepower required to navigate through the rock. This, along with its shallower depth, tends to reduce drilling costs, everything else being equal.
Niobrara
The Niobrara-DJ Basin is a crude oil and liquids rich gas play that is located in Northeast Colorado and Southeast Wyoming. The Niobrara is located in several areas of the Rocky Mountains, including the Powder River in Wyoming and in parts of Northwest Colorado. The portion that lies within the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin is a combination shale/marl/chalk/sandstone formation that lies at depths 5,500′-8,500′, and is comprised of three separate zones, or “benches:” the A, B, and C benches. Just below the C bench sits the Codell tight sands formation, which is more of an emerging natural gas play, but is also garnering the interest of operators, especially those who are able to drill commingled Niobrara and Codell wells.
Woodford
The Cana-Woodford (also known as the Anadarko-Woodford) is a liquids rich shale formation that is named after Canadian County, OK, although the formation underlies several counties in the western half of the state. Production in the Cana-Woodford kicked off in the 1930s from conventional vertical wells, with the industry’s first horizontal well coming in 2007. More recently, however, the counties that comprise the Cana fairway have been targeted for emerging oil plays, such as the SCOOP and STACK formations.
The Cana is a relatively deep formation, ranging from 8,000′-16,000′ in true vertical depth, with some wells reaching total measured depth greater than 20,000′. In 2011, the U.S. Energy Administration went so far as to declare the Cana-Woodford the deepest commercial horizontal shale play in the world. Similar to the Eagle Ford and the Ohio-Utica formations, the Cana features a dry gas, a condensate, and an oil window.
Other Tight Oil Formations
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