After nearly a century of exploration and production, the US Permian basin still holds technically recoverable reserves of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of hydrocarbon gas liquids according to a 2016 report from the US Geological Survey.

That is largely due to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology, which increased output from the basin before a levelling off in the face of lower oil prices in 2015.

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