Refracking offers hope to shale industry

Houston

THE technique itself is nothing new. Oil crews across the world have been schooled on its principles for generations: Identify ageing, low-output wells and hit them with a blast of sand and water to bolster the flow of crude. The idea originated somewhere in the plains of the American Midwest in the 1950s.

But as today's engineers start applying the procedure to the horizontal wells that went up during the fracking boom that swept across US shale fields over the past decade, something more powerful, more financially rewarding is happening.

The short life-span of these wells, long thought to be perhaps the biggest weakness of the shale industry, is being stretched out. Early evidence of the effects of re-stimulation suggests that the fields co…