Been hearing it for decades that $50 was the break even point for most of these methods to pan out profitably.
Been three years now and they still haven’t bothered to start, they must know something we don’t I guess.
That $50 figure is probably if all other things remain the same. Only they don’t. Everything else is tied up in the price of oil. So, as oil goes up, the $50 figure goes up, too. Like the carrot on the stick, just out of the donkey’s reach........forever......
What they know is that if supplies increase then prices will fall. That would be highly unacceptable to the stockholders. Heads would surely roll.
Big oil does not view themselves as "Americans." They see themselves as citizens of the world. The oil companies are ground zero for the implementation of the New World Order and they are willing to accept the short term destruction of the USA in favor of long term prosperity in a world with no borders and therefore no currency exchange rates. In fact, this strategy is forging ahead right on schedule.
I worked for Shell for 30 years, most of it in exploration and production.
Actually, a lot of the new technique applicability depends on the nature of the field as well the the return on investment. For example, horizontal drilling makes a lot of sense when the field is full of fractures resulting in many, many small “pockets” of oil, each of which would require a separate well to produce via conventional drilling.
I think that whoever wrote this piece for MIT unintentionally obfuscated the distinction between “International” oil companies (which tend to be more technologically advanced) and “National” oil companies which can be advanced but are more often that not really behind technologically -— sometimes astoundingly so (e.g., Russia under the reds).