The Permian Basin is still a winner for oil production

Daily Finance:

If you're an aficionado of oil and gas, their respective histories, and investing in the companies that produce them, you know all about the newly hot Eagle Ford play in South Texas and the Bakken/Three Forks in North Dakota and Montana. For my money, however, the most colorful and geologically fascinating of the plays in the onshore U.S. is the Permian Basin.

Whereas the Eagle Ford is a mere kindergartner at five years old, and the Bakkenis more senior, with production dating back more than half a century, the Permian is a nonagenarian play that's recently become friskier than ever. As you likely realize, the Permian region which covers much of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico through a 250-mile by 300-mile expanse, has, like the Bakken, found new life through the development of hydraulic fracturing and other technological wrinkles.

The Permian's first commercial well was spudded in 1921 in Mitchell County, Texas, on the eastern extremity of the play. Two years later it began producing and never missed a beat until it was capped in 1990, following nearly 70 years of output.

Subsequent work across acreage that once was covered by the Permian Sea disclosed a number of subsurface features, including the Midland Basin in the northeast, the Delaware Basin to the southwestern edge, and the Central Basin in the middle. The Wolfcamp shale overlies most of the basins at depths of between 7,000 and 10,000 feet and with thicknesses that run from about 1,500 feet to 2,600 feet.

Since it first began hosting drilling rigs, the Permian has, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, ginned out nearly 30 billion barrels of oil and 75 trillion cubic feet of gas. Today, the play accounts for about two-thirds of crude oil production in Texas and 15% of the output for the entire U.S. The 500 rigs working there today represent about a quarter of the U.S. total.

Fracking has dramatically changed the outlook for the Permian Basin. Geologists and geophysicists today predict that future production will exceed that of the past 90 years.
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There si more.

Not mentioned is the Cline formation they may have even more production in its shale play.  Midland and Odessa are again boom towns in West Texas where only those who want to be are unemployed.  They have the lowest rate of unemployment in the US.