U.S. drillers keeping the cap on oil wells

Drillers in America’s oil and gas fields are waiting for prices to recover before tapping into over 4,700 wells, some of which have remained untouched for the past year.

The fracklog, or number of wells waiting for hydraulic fracture, has tripled in the past year as oil companies have held off production to avoid flooding an already saturated market.

The pending bonanza, estimated to be 322,000 barrels a day worth of crude, is equivalent to the amount of oil produced this year by Libya, according to Bloomberg Business. Estimates show that amount could reach an average of nearly 7.5 million barrels in production by the end of 2016 if drillers begin chipping away at their fracklogs by 125 wells a month starting this October.

That figure assumes prices will remain unchanged and production at horizontal oilrigs drops off another 10 percent through the third quarter of 2015. Should crude recover to between $60 and $65 a barrel, the supply could increase to 500,000 barrels a day at an average of 7.67 million production barrels by the fourth quarter of 2016.

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