Less than two years after the price of oil briefly plummeted to roughly negative $37 a barrel, an oil boom is underway in America—even in places where drilling was all but abandoned two years ago.
“Private oil producers are leading an industry return to places like the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma and the DJ Basin in Colorado, where drilling had almost completely stopped in mid-2020,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
The Anadarko Basin, for example, has surged from just seven active drilling rigs to 46, according to energy analytics firm Enverus, while the DJ Basin in Colorado saw its number of active rigs jump from four to 15. Meanwhile, Utah’s Uinta Basin and the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, which both saw active rigs fall to zero in 2020, have seen rigs increase to roughly a dozen.
.@wsj: Frackers Push Into Once-Dead Shale Patches as Oil Nears $100 a Barrel. Oil producers drill in less-desirable areas like Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma and DJ Basin of Colorado, where activity virtually stopped during pandemic https://t.co/b1Ipx2lD3s #energy
— Amb Antonio Garza (@aogarza) February 21, 2022
‘It Feels Great’
What is driving frackers back to abandoned oil patches? It’s not newly discovered shale oil. Rather, it’s high oil prices.
The price of oil has surged in recent months, increasing from roughly $65 a barrel to the low-to-mid $90s in recent weeks. (The price of crude closed at just under $94 a barrel Monday.) The prices—which recently hit a seven-year high—are attracting drillers to shale patches that are more expensive to drill and thus require higher prices to be profitable.
For consumers, high oil prices can be a headache, because they result in higher gasoline prices. But for drillers, high oil prices mean more potential for profit.
Klee Watchous, president of the Kansas-based company Palomino Petroleum, says the higher prices have marked a turnaround for his small company and the surrounding communities where it operates.
“After many years of fighting this low oil-price situation, it feels great,” Watchous told the WSJ. “The cycles of boom and bust have been part of the oil-and-gas industry for decades, and no one knows how long it will last.”
Watchous is looking to seize on the higher prices to venture into Illinois in 2022, a state few companies have sought to tap in recent years.
A Lesson on Prices
Some might begrudge oil companies like Palomino profiting from high oil prices, but it’s precisely their desire for profits that can help tame surging oil prices. As oil companies expand their production, they increase the supply of oil, which inevitably puts a downward pressure on prices. It’s a perfect example of Adam Smith’s insight that free markets harness the self-interest of individuals to serve the whole.
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“Every individual… neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… he intends only his own security,” Smith explained in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; “and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
High prices do two important things in an economy. First, they encourage people to conserve scarce resources. Many people love steak and lobster, but few of us eat it every week or every month because it’s quite expensive. In other words, the high price discourages us from demanding steak and lobster. But that’s not the only function of the high price. It also encourages lobster trappers and beef companies to bring more of these products to market in pursuit of profit. Together, these two mechanisms help make scarce resources more abundant.
Price is arguably the simplest and most vital principle in economics. It signals both scarcity (to consumers) and opportunity (to entrepreneurs). Yet the economist Thomas Sowell has noted the importance of prices is often misunderstood by activists and politicians.
“Prices play a crucial role in determining how much of each resource gets used where and how the resulting products get transferred to millions of people,” Sowell wrote in Basic Economics. “Yet this role is seldom understood by the public and it is often disregarded entirely by politicians.”
Unintended Consequence of High Prices?
It’s worth noting that the word “price” never appeared in President Joe Biden’s 2020 executive order killing the Keystone XL Pipeline, an oil pipeline system between Canada and the US commissioned in 2010.
Nixing the 1,700-mile pipeline, which could have carried roughly 800k barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast, did nothing to reduce the pain at the pump consumers are feeling today, with gasoline currently at more than $3.50 a gallon. But that was expected.
What perhaps was unexpected was that higher prices would result in additional fracking—a process many contend is harder on the environment than regular drilling, and a practice Biden has said he wants to “move gradually away from.”
So while the role prices play in an economy is one of the most basic lessons in economics, politicians of every stripe would do well to remember one of the greatest fallacies: overlooking secondary consequences.
Image by Joshua Doubek, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Jon Miltimore
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Will America-First News Outlets Make it to 2023?
Things are looking grim for conservative and populist news sites.
There’s something happening behind the scenes at several popular conservative news outlets. 2021 was bad, but 2022 is proving to be disastrous for news sites that aren’t “playing ball” with the corporate media narrative. It’s being said that advertisers are cracking down, forcing some of the biggest ad networks like Google and Yahoo to pull their inventory from conservative outlets. This has had two major effects. First, it has cooled most conservative outlets from discussing “taboo” topics like Pandemic Panic Theater, voter fraud, or The Great Reset. Second, it has isolated those ad networks that aren’t playing ball.
Certain topics are anathema for most ad networks. Speaking out against vaccines or vaccine mandates is a certain path to being demonetized. Highlighting voter fraud in the 2020 and future elections is another instant advertising death penalty. Throw in truthful stories about climate change hysteria, Critical Race Theory, and the border crisis and it’s easy to understand how difficult it is for America-First news outlets to spread the facts, share conservative opinions, and still pay the bills.
Without naming names, I have been told of several news outlets who have been forced to either consolidate with larger organizations or who have backed down on covering certain topics out of fear of being “canceled” by the ad networks. I get it. This is a business for many of us and it’s not very profitable. Those of us who do this for a living are often barely squeaking by, so loss of additional revenue can often mean being forced to make cuts. That means not being able to cover the topics properly. Its a Catch-22: Tell the truth and lose the money necessary to keep telling the truth, or avoid the truth and make enough money to survive. Those who have chosen survival simply aren’t able to spread the truth properly.
We will never avoid the truth. The Lord will provide if it is His will. Our job is simply to share the facts, spread the Gospel, and educate as many Americans as possible while exposing the forces of evil.
To those who have the means, we ask that you please donate. We have options available now, but there is no telling when those options will cancel us. We have our GivingFuel page. There have been many who have been canceled by PayPal, but for now it’s still an option. Your generosity is what keeps these sites running and allows us to get the truth to the masses. We’ve had great success in growing but we know we can do more with your assistance.
Thank you, and God Bless!
JD Rucker
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