Will Fleckenstein, director of strategic relationship and enterprises for the College of Earth Resource Sciences and Engineering, was recently interviewed by the Denver Business Journal about the Permian Basin in West Texas. Denver-based FourPoint Energy is partnering with Texas' Double Eagle Energy to drill a swath of the booming oil and gas basin.
From the article:
Many of those [geological] layers were unproductive until recent years when drillers got better at drilling horizontally and precisely using hydraulic fracturing along lateral well bores several thousand feet long, said Colorado School of Mines' Will Fleckenstein, director of strategic relationship and enterprises at school's College of Earth Resource Sciences and Engineering.
"Until you could put all of those techniques together, you couldn't get a well to produce like you can now," he said. "There's more production now out of the Permian than you see out of Kuwait, and the numbers are being sustained for a long period of time."