US oil production wells up after Covid price crash | Financial Times

US oil production wells up after Covid price crash | Financial Times:

US oil companies have increased production by 1.2m barrels a day over the past six weeks, as they restore wells shut earlier this year and start producing from others they left unfinished as prices sank.

Output bottomed out at 9.7m b/d in the second week of June but has since risen to 10.9m b/d as activity starts to pick up in the big shale fields of Texas, according to Genscape, a division of consultancy Wood Mackenzie that monitors energy flows. That figure is more than the UK’s entire crude production of 1.1m b/d.

US production should now stabilise at about 11m b/d through to the end of 2020, analysts said. That is well below the 13m b/d in March before the Saudi-Russian price war and coronavirus pandemic devastated US oil prices.

“It’s a slow, slow recovery, but it’s happening,” said Alexandre Ramos-Peon, a senior analyst at Rystad Energy, a consultancy.