America’s oil industry has gone from being an outsider in the world’s crude market to stealing market share from OPEC, turning the US into a net exporter of petroleum and becoming an engine of the economy. Investors were
fleeing the sector just a few years ago, betting on the green transition as a global oil glut weighed on producers. But the iterative process of drilling thousands of wells each year—and learning from each one—has been a major reason for US productivity gains after years of tepid growth. US oil production will grow by 600,000 barrels a day in 2025, about 50% more than this year's growth, due to higher well productivity, according to BloombergNEF.
“You have a highly productive energy sector, and that results in a number of positive spillovers to the rest of the US economy,” said David Rodziewicz, a senior economics specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in an interview before the central bank’s pre-meeting communications blackout. “It covers us from larger commodity shocks compared to the 1980s or 1990s, when we were broadly a net importer of these products.”