HOUSTON — Oil production in Texas has hit its highest monthly rate on record, more than doubling in less than three years, according new federal data.
The state pumped 2.7 million barrels of crude per day during September, the highest monthly average since at least January 1981. Texas oil production had been declining since the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly record-keeping began in 1981. But the tide abruptly turned in 2008 with the beginning of the shale oil and gas boom.
For 25 straight months, the state’s oil production rate has increased by more than 25 percent year-over-year, notes economist Mark J. Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Management.
“Output in America’s No. 1 oil-producing state — Texas — continues its phenomenal, meteoric rise,” Perry wrote on his Carpe Diem blog. “That production surge has to be one of the most significant increases in oil output ever recorded in the U.S. over such a short period of time.”
Texas produced 35 percent of the United States’ crude oil in September. The growth largely has been fueled by oil production in South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale and West Texas’ Permian Basin, which have expanded rapidly to produce more than 1 million barrels of oil per day each, placing them among nine “super-giant oil fields” in the world, Perry says.
Texas’ oil production peaked in 1972, when it produced an average of 3.4 million barrels per day, according to data from the Texas Railroad Commission.
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