EOG ended up focused on the Eagle Ford Shale, which underlies South Texas. The Eagle Ford was regarded as the source rock—the “kitchen”—for other Texas oil fields, but it was considered to have little commercial potential of its own. Yet in their research, the EOG geologists came across seismic logs from very low-production wells called “strippers” that had been drilled decades ago. As they examined the logs, they became more and more excited. The production profiles of those old wells matched up with how shale wells performed—high initial production, then declining to steady production at a
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