The oil price plummet of the past several weeks brought with it projections of reduced activity in 2015, but oil producers tout confidence in the Permian Basin’s prospects even as they wait to see how low prices will drop and how long prices will stay down.

By Friday, the benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude price was $75.92, more than a 28 percent drop from the more than $107 per barrel price reached in June. That follows a drop of global oil prices as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries looks to cut prices instead of production in the face of global oversupply and weaker than anticipated demand.

Global crude prices could keep sliding through the first half of 2015, The International Agency reported in a monthly report released Friday.

But oil producers, investors and analysts point to the Permian Basin’s stacked resource plays and greater infrastructure as contributing to a lower break-even barrel price for operators in the region than other energy production areas, such as the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and offshore drilling in the Gulf Coast.

“The bottom line is returns may be lower but the area will continue to attract a lot of capital with the number of locations and the amount of capital required,” said Andy Taurins, managing director of Lantana Energy Advisors, a Houston-based acquisition and divestiture firm active in the Permian Basin who spoke recently at Hart Energy’s Executive Oil Conference. “Most people will be just fine.”

Nonetheless, industry experts expect to see a drop in rig count in the Permian Basin and for companies to scale back production in less developed areas at the fringe of the oil play.

Supermajor oil companies such as Chevron are still expected to drive a lot of the region’s growth in 2015. But they also have extensive positions in the Wolfcamp that remain undeveloped, allowing companies of that size to focus on development elsewhere in the world rather than build marginal wells in the Permian Basin.

But that is not the case for dozens of other oil companies that operate in the region, many of them small and private. There are also 10 public companies whose operations focus entirely or almost entirely on the Permian Basin.

A review of recent public statements by these companies offers a glimpse of drillers’ attitudes as they finish their plans for the coming year.

Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield in a Nov. 6 conference call said he could foresee a $70 to $80 oil price environment during the next two years.

“As you all know, the price of oil has dropped about $30 a barrel. It is $1 trillion stimulus per year to the world economy,” Sheffield said. “It’s going to take a while to get the demand side up in the world today. At the same time, we’re in a battle with Saudi Arabia in regard to market share versus U.S. shale oil.”

Most, such as Pioneer Natural Resources, tout flexible drilling contracts and cash supply that allow them to adjust to a lower price environment. Pioneer also has about 85 percent of its 2015 production hedged at $90 a barrel, according to company statements, and Pioneer plans to grow production by double digits in the coming years.

Pioneer officials, like their peers, also seek lower costs from the service companies they contract with to complete their wells.

The oil price drop has yet to force such a decrease in costs.

“I mean, how deep is this trough? How low could prices go? ... There are people wanting to be continuing to incur narrowing debt in order to fund their program,” said Thomas E. Jorden, CEO of the pure-play operator Cimarex during an earnings call earlier this month. “And it’s going to take the market laying some rigs down to see service cost reset. Service costs aren’t going to respond to the oil and gas price. They’re going to respond to demand for services.”

For now, the horizontal wells that producers increasingly drill mean a growing demand for such services — frack jobs that require greater pumping horsepower, water and manpower. Nearly 60 percent of the Permian Basin’s 568 rigs drill horizontally.

And some of the Permian Basin’s biggest operators plan to continue with aggressive horizontal drilling regimens. Concho Resources, for example, runs a horizontal rig fleet of 31, the largest in the region and produces about 115,000 barrels of oil per day. Company officials plan to continue to follow a plan to more than double 2013 production in three years, according to C. William Giraud, the company’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer.

“This is a plan that we believe we could do in today’s commodity and service price environment,” Giraud said. “However, if we were to continue to see commodity prices soften from here, or if we don’t get help at all on the service company side, at some point next year it’s likely that we would just tap on the brakes.”

Calgary-based Encana Corporation in September announced the purchase of the Permian Basin operator Athlon Energy for nearly $6 billion. Despite the potential for months or years of low prices, the company’s 2015 plan calls for deploying at least $1 billion in capital in the region, including an operation of seven horizontal rigs by the end of next year, up to eight vertical rigs and an average 50,000 barrels of oil production per day.

“Even in an $80 or $85 oil price world, we’ll still see substantial cash flow growth from where we started,” said Encana CEO Doug Suttles during an earnings call earlier this month.

A study by Wood Mackenzie released this spring found that most tight oil production in the nation, especially in the Permian Basin, would remain economic at $75 per barrel oil.

The threats producers cannot control that could bring a bust would be external factors such as a ban on hydraulic fracturing or a global economic collapse. But Wood Mackenzie argued the chief challenges producers would have to tackle are twofold: securing takeaway infrastructure to avoid discounts in getting their crude to market and bringing down costs, especially on the completion side such as by utilizing longer and more efficient laterals.

“The overriding thing is the independents keep drilling, and they pull back on the high cost a little, on the costs at the fringe,” said Ben Shattuck, an analyst with Wood Mackenzie in Houston. “It’s not something that is catching operators completely by surprise. People were expecting a lower pricing environment for a while.”