You're listening to the Oil and Gas This Week podcast with Mark LeCour and Jake Corley.

This is the show for busy oil pros who quickly want to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry.

Welcome back to another episode of Oil and Gas this week.

You're listening to episode 139. What's up, Mark? It's our first Friday Q&A, Jake. And you know what that means? You

guys write in, we answer your questions and hopefully provide you a tons of value. You want to jump

right into it? Yeah, before we jump in though, folks, if you like the show, do us a favor,

leave us a review on iTunes. It takes 30 seconds. It is the best way to support the show. So real quick, just leave us a review. Let's jump in the first question, Jake. Cool. First question is from Alex Stanislovsky. He writes, guys, great show as a long-time listener. I have three questions for you. So let's break this down. I'll just break it under the first one and then we'll tackle the other ones. When you look at the geological map of the U.S., there are five major basins. As a native of Illinois, the Illinois basin or New Albany Shale at one point, was a second producing field in the 80s. So any reasons that there's little to no activity in this field with the latest horizontal extraction methods and price of crude going back up?

Yeah, so good question.

So that field, the New Albany Shale, was hot and heavy.

It was before the 80s.

I mean, that thing was hot and heavy in the 70s, I believe.

And it's a combination of different shales, right?

And it's in between layers different shales, right?

And it's in between layers of different type of rocks, basically sandstone and dolomite.

So, and there's a lot of organic carbon in the ground there.

The problem is getting out the ground economically. You can get out the ground economically now, but that break-even point in that field is probably

right around $70, $70, $70 a barrel, which is actually cheaper in some of the other

basins to get it out.

So, Alex, the answer to your question is the hydrocarbons are there.

We can recover them, but it's a simple economic reason that there's not a lot of activity

there.

As we go forward in time, I would suspect that that field will be one that some of the big

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