America's Oil Boom Concentrated in Ten Permian Counties
If you want to know where America’s oil boom is happening, no need to look at the whole map—because it’s limited to just ten counties in the Permian Basin. Between 2020 and 2024, these small dots in Texas and New Mexico delivered 93% of all U.S. crude oil growth, according to the latest EIA and Enverus data.
It's almost like the rest of the US doesn’t even matter when it comes to oil production growth.
The U.S. added 1.9 million barrels per day (bpd) of new crude and condensate output over that stretch. But nearly all of it came from Lea and Eddy counties in New Mexico, plus Martin and Midland on the Texas side. Lea and Eddy alone punched out almost 1 million bpd of growth—more than half the national total. That puts two dusty counties in New Mexico on par with the production increases seen from OPEC heavyweights like Iraq or the UAE in their strongest years.
Martin and Midland chipped in another 400,000 bpd, while six more Texas counties—Andrews, Glasscock, Howard, Loving, Reagan, and Ward—added 360,000 bpd combined. Everywhere else in the United States, from Alaska to offshore Gulf of Mexico, growth barely reached 130,000 bpd.
By 2024, those ten Permian counties averaged 4.8 million bpd—37% of all U.S. crude production. That’s more than the entire output of Kuwait and nearly as much as Iraq’s total. The math is stark: when it comes to U.S. oil growth, the map isn’t fifty states wide. It’s ten counties deep.
The formations driving the surge—Bone Spring, Spraberry, and Wolfcamp—have become shorthand for America’s shale dominance. Drillers have been high-grading, squeezing more barrels out of the same acreage, and the geology has kept delivering.
In effect, a handful of counties in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico have added more new oil supply since 2020 than some OPEC members produce outright — a reminder that the balance of global oil power still tilts heavily toward the Permian.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com