Chevron "spent the 1990s and early 2000s breaking deep-sea drilling records in the Gulf of Mexico [but now shifts to shale oil, particularly in Permian Basin]
"Chevron, the world's third-largest publicly traded oil producer, is spending $3.3 billion this year in the Permian and an additional $1 billion in other shale basins.
Due to shale oil, "US oil output * * * already exceeds 10 million barrels a day, surpassing the record set in 1970.
The story of the Scharbauer SE71 well in Midland County, which when completed will extend about 9,000 feet [2,743m] down and then almost two miles sideways, began more than 75 years ago. In 1888, Texas & Pacific Railway Co went belly-up and bondholders seized some of the lands that the state had granted to the railroad. By the 1920s, drillers were tapping gushers in the region; one of those, Texaco, began snapping up control of former railroad rights-of-way, including, in 1962, the purchase of former railway acreage rights belonging to TXL Oil Corp. When Chevron bought Texaco in 2001, it inherited a treasure trove of untapped Permian riches. Today, Chevron controls 2.2 million acres of Permian rock, an area the size of Yellowstone National Park. Even better, it pays little or no royalties on 80 percent of its holdings, boosting its profitability. (Typically, explorers must pay landowners 10 percent to 25 percent royalties.) In stark contrast to Chevron’s inherited Permian position, rival Exxon Mobil Corp paid about $6 billion for drilling rights in the region last year, after making its entrance into shale through the $35 billion purchase of XTO Energy Inc. in 2010. And Royal Dutch Shell Plc spent $1.9 billion in 2012 to build its Permian position.
"Straddling West Texas and southeast New Mexico, the Permian Basin [is composed of ] strata of oil-bearing rock. The region has been drilled for a century using simple vertical wells. But production started to decline from the 1970s, in part because most reserves were encased in rock so dense engineers couldn’t figure out how to extract it. * * * in the 2000s * * * wildcatters and independent oil producers began to crack the hard-rock code. Combining hydraulic fracturing (the process of using high-pressure streams of water and sand to separate oil from within rock, popularly known as fracking) with new sideways drilling techniques provided the magic formula needed to unlock shale's riches.
"the shale spending spree is a departure from Big Oil's traditional business model. In the past, Chevron would devote the bulk of its investment to multibillion-dollar engineering marvels hundreds of miles offshore that took years to build. All that changed after oil prices crashed in 2014, leading companies to focus on less-expensive projects [read: shale oil] that delivered cash quickly.
Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: The oil giant's long-ignored acreage in the Permian Basin has made it a shale leader
(b) The online version is identical to print.
(c) Regarding quotation 2. The en.wikipedia.org for Chevron says it is "world's fourth-largest publicly traded oil company" without a citation. Fobes agrees. See Lauren Gensler, The World's Largest Oil And Gas Companies 2017: Exxon Reigns Supreme, While Chevron Slips. Forbes.com, May 24, 2017
(ExxonMobil > Royal Dutch > PetroChina > Chevron)
(d) "Scharbauer SE71 [oil] well in Midland County * * * In 1888, Texas & Pacific Railway Co went belly-up * * * When Chevron bought Texaco in 2001, it inherited a treasure trove of untapped Permian riches."
(i) John Scharbauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scharbauer
(1852-1941; in 1887 purchased a ranch near Midland, Texas)
(ii)
(A) Texas and Pacific Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_and_Pacific_Railway
(1871–1976; Missouri Pacific Railroad owned the majority shares of in 1928, and acquired in 1976 T&P -- Union Pacific Railroad purchased Missouri Pacific in 1980)
(B) George C Werner, Texas Pacific Railway. In Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association (a NPO), last modified July 22, 2016 https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/eqt08
("The Texas and Pacific Railway Company was the only railroad in Texas, and one of the few in the United States, to operate under a federal charter. Congress granted a charter to the Texas Pacific Railroad Company * * * [in] 1871; by an Act of Congress * * * With the end of the Civil War, the project to construct a southern transcontinental railroad was revived, and the Texas Pacific was given the right to build from Marshall, Texas [currently a city 150 miles east of Dallas near Louisiana line], to San Diego, California. The company was granted a federal land grant * * * The discovery of oil along the Texas and Pacific line in West Texas during the late 1920s and later in East Texas had a major impact on the company. In 1928 crude oil accounted for 22 percent of all freight tonnage" for T&P)
(iii) "When Chevron bought Texaco in 2001, it inherited a treasure trove of untapped Permian riches."
Print carries a map (also online) whose heading is "Leading the Pack." Chevron is represented by red (color), which is mostly dispersed but a few red splotches means Chevron holdings are (almost) contiguous.
(iv)
(A) Permian Basin (North America)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(North_America)
(a sedimentary basin; It is so named because it has one of the world's thickest deposits of rocks from the Permian geologic period
(B) Perm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perm
(in the European part of Russia near the Ural Mountains section 1 Etymology)
(C) International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) http://www.stratigraphy.org/
In the left column of the home page, click "Chart/Time Scale." In the new Web page, you will see four column: the left-most is the most recent. Sedimentary rocks will be stratified in exactly the same layers (but if a seafloor is uplifted to become land, sedimentation is obviously different before and after.)