Saudi Arabia isn’t buying the peak oil demand narrative. OPEC’s largest producer continues to expect global oil demand to keep rising at least by 2040 and sees itself as the oil producer best equipped to continue meeting that demand, thanks to its very low production costs.

Why would a company spend millions of dollars to drill an oil well and then not finish it? There are a couple of  reasons. Thanks to rapid advancements in drilling technology shale oil wells can actually be drilled faster than they can be completed. This can result in a high inventory of uncompleted wells called “drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs)”.  But when the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) counts DUCs they don’t count the recently completed ones to allow time for completion.