When I started out in the Patch, we were drilling vertical wells through conventional reservoirs, looking for structural and stratigraphic traps and a payday. Now, we're drilling wells that finish up (TD) three miles or more away from the surface location in rock formations that were not considered producible back then. We drill more in an hour now than we drilled in a day back then.
Transition? The goal is the same. To provide useful fuels and chemical feedstock for a wide variety of uses.
Sorry, but photovoltaics and windmills use that stuff, they don't produce it.
But along the years we have occasionally heard of or seen those unscrupulous 'operators' who would sell 200% or more of the interest in a (predictably) dry hole, and hire contractors where the money fed back to the unscrupulous and then shrug off the P&A, with a lot of jingle in their pocket.
Nothing has changed, just the means of producing the investors.
