In the Permian, oil wells stopped going straight down and started going sideways
Draw an oil well and you will probably draw a hole going down. In the Permian — western Texas and eastern New Mexico — the working part of the well now makes a turn and keeps going sideways — and over the last ten years it has grown a lot longer.
A horizontal well is drilled down, then curved until it is running sideways through the rock layer that holds the oil and gas. That sideways part is called the lateral. In the Permian, the average lateral on a new horizontal well grew 77% in ten years — from 6,149 feet in 2015 to 10,867 feet in 2025. That is a bit over two miles, sideways.
Basis: EIA, “Longer wells boost Permian crude oil and natural gas production” (August 19, 2026), using data from Enverus.
Short wells nearly vanished. Laterals under 5,000 feet were 43% of Permian wells completed in 2015; by 2025 they were 4% of horizontal wells. Mid-length laterals — 5,000 to 15,000 feet — went from 57% in 2015 to a peak of 90% in 2021, then settled at 81% in 2025.
Basis: Same EIA article.
The very long ones have a nickname: super-laterals, meaning a lateral longer than 15,000 feet — getting on for three miles of sideways hole. EIA says they were virtually nonexistent before 2020. In 2025 they were 15% of all new Permian well completions.
Basis: Same EIA article.
Why bother going so far? EIA's explanation is short: a longer lateral touches much more of the rock that holds oil and gas, so a company can get more out while drilling fewer wells — and fewer wells means lower overhead costs.
Basis: Same EIA article: longer laterals “allow operators to contact significantly more reservoir rock with each well, maximizing production while keeping well counts, and therefore overhead costs, down.”
You can see it in the totals. New horizontal well completions in the Permian have stayed around 6,000 a year since 2022 — roughly flat. Meanwhile the region's output climbed from 2.9 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2015 to 11.2 million in 2025, an increase of 284%.
Basis: Same EIA article (production figures from EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook, August 2026).
Does that mean longer laterals caused all of the increase? The article's own headline says longer wells boost production, so EIA does connect the two — but a decade is long enough for many things to change at once, and the article does not measure how much of the growth each change is responsible for. “These two things moved together” is solid. “This one thing did all of it” is a guess.
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
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