If you drive through the Permian or Anadarko basins, or East Texas, you will see tens of thousands of jack-pumps working 24x7. Many can be remotely controlled, switched on and off, based upon the price of oil. (Needless to say, they haven't been switched off for a long time.) Sadly, few produce any large quantities of oil, which is why they have to be switched off when prices fall below a set mark. The daily oil output won't pay the electric bill for the pump. In the late Nineties, you saw almost every pump sitting idle, because oil was so cheap. It's actually pretty interesting because owners or management companies have to keep track of both the well output and price of oil. When prices were sane, the number of wells pumping or shut down in a fairly small area would vary on a daily basis. Very few wells are capped. Old wells with no hope of economical production are plugged with cement, and you basically have to re-drill. That's cost-prohibitive unless you believe you can recover the cost through production, in which case the well likely would not have been plugged. However, technology produces new and better recovery techniques every day, so a lot of old, tapped out areas are being looked at again. Most of that technology is extremely expensive, but as long as oil is as valuable as it is, companies are willing to pay more to recover more. If the price of oil rolls back to a point where the numbers don't add up, everything grinds to a screeching halt again. Right now, Exxon Mobil pays an average of about $8.00 to bring one barrel of oil up to the wellhead. (They then turn around and sell or transfer that for around $116 as of yesterday.) But remember, that production cost is an AVERAGE. When you're dealing with an old, tired well that requires gas injection or even pressurized hot water to free up the oil, the production cost per barrel is very high. As the price of oil rolls back, the high cost wells are shut down. As with any business, when it costs more to produce an item than it can be sold for, you either raise prices or that item goes away. Since oil companies don't set the price of oil, all they can do is reduce cost by turning off the expensive wells.