The Permian, in production for almost a century, is so bounteous that it fueled the Allied forces battling Germany and Japan during World War II. In recent years, though, the basin had been in decline, and big oil companies like Exxon Mobil sold assets to small independents that were willing to scrape the remaining barrels of old wells by flooding them with water and carbon dioxide.

But the Permian received new life about a decade ago when drillers began experimenting with hydraulic fracturing to blast through shale fields that course through the region. Exploration by Pioneer Natural Resources and a few other companies found multiple layers of shale — six to eight oil-rich zones, one on top of the other, like a layer cake — that offer companies the opportunity to drill through multiple reservoirs on the same real estate.

The geological virtues of the Permian, along with an existing robust array of pipelines, have made the basin the cheapest to develop of any shale oil field in the country. The break-even price for the best acreage in the basin is as low as $40 a barrel, where in most other shale fields the break-even price can be $10 to $20 higher. With acreage prices for oil properties multiplying by 10 times or more since 2012, oil executives are starting to talk of “Permania.”

As a whole, most of the American oil patch remains in the doldrums since the price of a barrel of oil skidded from more than $110 a barrel in 2014 to less than half that. In Texas alone, 100,000 oil workers — one out of three — have lost their jobs in recent years. Only 522 oil drilling rigs are now active in the United States, compared with 1,609 in October 2014, and the number fell by seven last week.