[thackney]

Which all gets away from my original point: the recent surge in fracking as an extraction method is a result of $100 oil,

Do you understand, the drilling rig count, went significantly high before we reached those prices?

[Riflema]

Yes, it did grow very nicely early in the century, but I'd suggest this was simply new plays and better utilization of fracking+horizontal drilling being deployed. After that, if you graph price/rig count you'll see it follows price pretty clearly. That steady price rise in crude also suggests that this refinement of the process had no impact on price (it should lower it, right?). The rig count stayed high all he time crude was over $95.

Overall therefore, I'd argue that the fracking/horizontal implementation was NOT a productivity enhancement, it meant spending more effort/money to get the same output (regardless of the fact that the output would have been impossible without the tech). Getting more widgets/dollar of cost is productivity growth, that is the opposite of what the oil patch has been doing.