Every phase from the first geological survey to the moment a well starts producing. Hover any segment for detail. Note the axis is years, not months: the deepwater bar is roughly six times the length of the land bar.
Once oil is flowing, the rest is logistics, and it is the same for all three. Refining is the fastest step in the entire chain. Note the axis here is days, not years.
The single most misunderstood number in the industry. It depends entirely on whether you are drilling into a known reservoir or a guess.
Reading the chart, and the scarcinality of it. These are typical cycle times, not guarantees. Every number here is a midpoint in a wide range: a land well in a permitted, well-mapped basin can go faster, and a deepwater project in a frontier basin with no existing infrastructure can take fifteen years or never happen at all. Regulatory regime matters enormously, as federal land and offshore leases carry permitting timelines that private mineral rights in Texas do not.
The framework's interest is the lag. When oil prices spike, the political demand is always for more drilling, and the implicit assumption is that supply can answer quickly. The chart shows why it cannot. Even the fastest case, a land well in an active shale basin, is over a year from survey to first oil, and that assumes leases, permits, rigs, crews, and pipeline capacity all already exist. Deepwater decisions being made today are answering a price signal from the late 2010s. This is the physical reason the rig count lags the oil price by six to twelve months, which is visible directly in the
rig count and Brent chart. A shortage of oil is one of the genuinely real scarcities, the kind the framework says money cannot conjure away, because no monetary policy shortens the time it takes to build a floating production platform.
And most of it fails. Roughly seven in ten high-impact exploration wells find nothing commercial. In ultra-deepwater over 2021 to 2025, only two of thirty-seven wells made a commercial discovery. Those dry holes are paid for by the wells that succeed, which is why the economics require the price to stay high long enough to justify a decade of committed capital, and why producers hedge rather than chase spot prices.
Sources: EIA and Dallas Fed (Permian spud-to-production and drilling times); BOEM and NOIA (Gulf of Mexico project lifecycle); Westwood Energy (high-impact exploration commercial success rates, 2021 to 2025); API and PHMSA (pipeline transit and distribution); industry cycle-time literature. Success rates are commercial success, meaning discoveries large enough to develop, not merely wells that encountered hydrocarbons.