at the same time profitable for the industry.

The industry faced an enormous amount of unserviceable debt when Trump allowed the Sauds and his BFF the Russians flood us with cheap oil with the obvious purpose of disrupting our industry. Bankruptcies were becoming common even before Covid hit, and credit throughout the patch was difficult to obtain in the face of sustained losses. There was a law firm in Texas who had a big practice in energy bankruptcy. They reported $50B in unserviceable debt. By the time Trump's criminal gangs were attacking DC at his command, we were down to only 300 working rigs, by far, by really far, a modern day record low. We've been humming in the 700's all year now as profitability drives production (it's a very slow increase due to process constraints such as trained labor and availability of maintain rigs).

You gotta hand it to the Republican field of non-serious candidates though with their promises to drill everywhere for oil to get gas cheap again. I just wish one of them would explain why any oil company would plan to drill at a loss. The high costs of exploration, negotiating leases, transporting rigs and crews, drilling and developing wells simply cannot be done on the cheap. The flood of easy money to drillers burned too many investors who aren't about to fund money losing production a second time. Last time, (with less production) we had cheap gas because Trump was kissing Saudi and Russian asses as they intentionally flooded us with cheap oil knowing the damage they were doing to our energy industry. It must be quite a revelation to Putin to be getting his ass kicked instead of kissed.