The shale revolution made the United States the world’s largest oil producer. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing turned once-uneconomic resources into enormous producing basins, pushed U.S. output to record levels, and changed the global oil market.

But that playbook is maturing. Shale wells decline quickly, and the highest-quality drilling inventory is finite. Maintaining American production over the coming decades will increasingly require more than drilling another generation of wells.

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