US Energy Secretary Chris Wright is challenging the industry to significantly boost oil and gas recovery.
“Those awesome shale reservoirs with high permeability and high deliverability, we're still only getting about 10% of the oil out,” the founder and former head of Liberty Energy said during SPE’s Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, on 3 February. “Let's figure out how to double that recovery.”
It is, he acknowledged, a hard problem, but a worthy one that, if solved, could help lift billions of people out of energy poverty to live longer and healthier lives.
“If you can figure out how to get more oil out over the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years, it'll be awesome for the world,” he said.
Meeting such a challenge requires both incremental and revolutionary innovations, industry leaders said during the conference’s opening plenary.
Birlie Bourgeois, general manager for applied technology solutions and shale and tight business at Chevron, noted that while many industry innovations have been incremental, some major breakthroughs have emerged from combining existing technologies—for example, pairing horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing to enable the shale revolution.
“We took what was considered junk rock 20 years ago, and it's become the most prolific growth engine of hydrocarbon production around the world,” he said.
And that happened because if people couldn't make shale wells work, they couldn't pay the bills. And the ingenuity of those early days hasn’t stopped, he said.
Bourgeois is hopeful that one of the innovations in the industry’s future means fracturing a decade from now won’t be so reliant on resources.
“I hope it's not water fracs with sand. I hope we get to the innovation that we can figure out waterless fracs” so fresh water can be used in other ways, he said.
Changing how things are done, he added, will require “smart people willing to take risks and putting things together in a different way.”
James Ritchie, vice president for upstream technology portfolio at ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Co., pointed to the importance of building on innovations of the past. Combining technologies like proppants, drilling logs, laterals, and modeling, along with physics understanding, helps move the industry forward, he said.
“The models get better, the physics understanding gets better, helps you tailor the proppants, tailor the fracture,” he said.
Having good diagnostics is critical, said 2026 SPE President Jennifer Miskimins and petroleum engineering department head at Colorado School of Mines.
“We have a visualization of what we think is happening, then all of sudden we come up with a new diagnostic that throws that completely out of the water,” she said. “That's something that we need to continue to push the envelope on. We can't see it, so we've got to be able to figure out a way to discern what's happening.”
Kyle Haustveit, assistant secretary in the Department of Energy’s Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office, stressed that the industry can’t manage what it doesn’t measure.
“We're still really ineffective in measuring production levels” such as cluster level of production being contributed from different designs, he said. “I think we need to continue to invest in diagnostics that give us the granularity as to how the wellbore produces, not at the surface but along the lateral.”
Similarly, he said, it’s hard to improve fractures without knowing where proppant is going.
“We have a decent understanding of where the hydraulic fractures are. We still really don't know where the proppant goes, beyond a couple inches from the wellbore. So, I think we need to be thinking about diagnostic projects” aimed at learning more about that, Haustveit said.
Ritchie noted the importance of getting hydraulic fracturing right.
“You’ve got your fracture, and you’ve got your EOR, but your EOR can’t be successful if you don’t get your fracture right,” he said, adding that refracturing focus is related to not getting the fractures right the first time around.
Bourgeois is keen for technology that will help break more rock to create more surface area.
“Physics remains undefeated, and the rock's going to break the way the rock wants to break unless you do something fundamentally different,” he said. “There's really cool things that we can do that work at the lab, and they work within 10 in. from a rock, but it's not at a scale that we think we can make money at.”
AI and the Future
Miskimins said she’s a convert when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) because the more she has seen it applied correctly, the more impressive the capacity, for example in terms of better understanding the subsurface.
“When we look at processing of seismic, and we look at the geologic models, and if we can actually figure out what that looks like, it's going to help us understand a lot more about how the fracks are going to look,” she said.
It is critical, she said, that subject matter experts carry out quality-control checks on AI results to “make sure that what you're seeing comes out makes sense.”
Haustveit called AI an efficient productivity multiplier.
“In the past, humans had to learn computer language. Today computers learn human language. So now we can come out of school as an engineer and not need to know how to code line by line,” he said, adding the caveat that “it still requires subject matter expertise to write the correct prompt to get the right information out of it.”
Ritchie said AI can be helpful for dealing with all the data the industry generates but making sure the large language models are trained properly is important.
“The magic is, if you could speak ‘geologist talk’ and you can speak ‘AI talk’ and mix that, that is the unicorn,” he said.
Yet the potential of AI–and its existential threat to jobs–is one of the challenges when in drawing the next generation into the oil patch.
Miskimins said, “We are seeing a reduction in people wanting to get 4-year degrees in general. You trim that down into those that are interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), and you start to trim those down into those that are interested in things like petroleum engineering, mining engineering, geology, geophysics. Across the board, we're seeing a really reducing pool for people joining our industry. And then there's, of course, the fear of AI on top of that and will I have a job or not?”
Bourgeois believes they can have a future because the world will continue to need energy.
“I tell people now, you're going to have a career 50 years from now. Because even in the most aggressive scenarios, oil and gas is a part of the equation,” he said.
Historically, even as new energy sources are added to the mix, existing sources don’t go away.
Haustveit said the world has “consumed more of every form of energy every single year since that energy form has been introduced. And that's not going to change.”
But when talking with the public or people who might be interested in coming into the industry, he said it’s important to be frank about the fact that each energy source has its own pros and cons.
“Don't shy away from the trade-offs of all energy forms. We're constantly trying to defend and talk about oil pros. People will tend to withdraw and try to argue. Every energy form has trade-offs. We need to talk about the trade-offs clearly,” he said.
Talking about the facts can only go so far, though. Miskimins said the next generation is interested in making a difference in the world.
“Find the facts, know the facts, be able to talk about the facts. But I think it's also really important to be able to talk to a passion. A lot of our younger generation, our students, they're not as interested in the paycheck anymore. They like the paycheck, but that's not necessarily the driver. A lot of times they want to make a difference. And if you can hit that passion and hit the fact that by joining this industry you can make a difference in the lives of people,” it can interest youth in joining the industry, she said.
