Most Productive US Industry Is One That Wall Street Wrote Off (1)

In a dusty swath of sagebrush country near the Texas-New Mexico border, engineers at oil producer Matador Resources Co. encountered a problem.

Conventional wisdom called for drilling four wells into the ground and then horizontally to access layers of oil-soaked rock, a technical feat perfected by the US shale industry. But the plot of land was too narrow, limiting each well’s reach and likely making them unprofitable. So the engineers tried a novel concept: a U-turn. After boring vertically to the shale layer, they went sideways for one mile, curved the well around and then drilled back to where it began. It ...