The plunge in oil prices last year led many to say that a decline in U.S. oil production wouldn’t be far behind. This was because almost all the growth in U.S. production in recent years had come from high-cost tight oil deposits which could not be profitable at these new lower oil prices. These wells were also known to have production declines that averaged 40 percent per year. Overall U.S. production, however, confounded the conventional logic and continued to rise– until early June when it stalled and then dropped slightly . Anyone who understood that U.S. drillers in shale plays had large inventories of drilled, but not yet completed wells, knew that production would probably rise for some time into 2015– even as the number of rigs operating plummeted . Shale drillers who are in debt–and most of the independents are heavily in debt–simply must get some revenue out […]