Energy producers have been cheered by the election of Republican Donald Trump, whose cabinet picks include oil industry allies like climate-change skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency and ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.
"Operators are still being guarded with their money," said Jason McFarland, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors in Houston. "But certainly we're seeing a loosening of the grip on investments as the price of oil rises."
Even more important, sentiment got a boost from the November 30 agreement by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut production to address a supply glut that had threatened to push oil prices back to multi-year lows.
After the OPEC deal, "it is meaningfully different in sentiment," said David Pursell, a managing director at the Houston energy investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. "Before November 30, this was like the Bataan Death March," he said, referring to the grim outlook in the industry.
Now, "People are cautiously optimistic, which is light years from where we were eight weeks ago."
US oil prices, which tumbled to close to $25 a barrel a year ago, closed at $53.99 a barrel on Friday.
Part of the industry's hesitancy is due to skepticism about whether OPEC members and countries outside the cartel, such as Russia, will actually comply with the agreed production cuts.
And if the cuts are implemented, there remains the question of what will happen if the agreement is not renewed after its six-month duration.
OPEC appears to be signalling that "high-cost producers should not take for granted that they will receive a free ride to higher production," the International Energy Agency said in a report last month.
Other unknowns that will affect the market include the path of US consumption in the expected fast-growth Trump era; whether Indian demand will stay high; and how the ever-evolving Chinese economy will affect its thirst for petroleum.
Shale is another question mark. The US is expected to see capital investment recover more quickly than other countries that have long-term oil investment cycles.
The rise of American shale production, made possible by technological leaps in drilling and resource recovery, lifted US production to multi-decade highs in 2015 of about 9.6 million barrels per day (bpd), a remarkable 80 percent higher than in 2010.
But that momentum came to a screeching halt amid the industry downturn, and US production fell back to 8.6 million bpd in September 2016. Recent higher prices have seen that figure creep back up to 8.8 million bpd, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2017