What The US Has Left

There is a lot of talk that sixty dollar oil with bring the US frackers back. That may be true, but how much extra production will that even bring on line?
Horizontal drilling and fracking opened up a lot of the US shales for business. And like any new field, production surged. Over a thousand new rigs popped up, drilling accross multiple shale fields. We all know the price plummeted and the number of operating rigs did as well. Despite the massive drop in rigs over a year ago, US production has only started to drop. That tells us that the rigs still in operation are supremely effective and the twelve hundred odd ones were not. Finding oil is not an exact science. Multiple test wells need to be drilled to find the sweet spots within formations. And with sixteen hundred operational wells, that's a lot of holes. It's pretty safe to assume that a lot of the honey holes have been found and are currently being produced. So even if the frackers do come back in droves, how much is even left. Yes there is a whole lot of raw oil down there, but the average quality of well would almost certainly be significantly lower than it was in 2011.
These huge shale formations need to be looked at as one field each. And as such they have all peaked and are now in decline. I can't see enough companies coming back and operating whild oil is under a hundred dollars to do anything other than just offset the current US decline. Unless they completely open up the Arctic for drilling and there are huge finds up there, I don't think the US will ever hit nine million BPD again.