Not many people think of the Netherlands as oil country, but a billion-barrel field lies under a nine-mile strip of grazing land along the Dutch-German border. When oil prices cratered in the 1990s, Royal Dutch Shell (RDS/B) and ExxonMobil (XOM) shut the Schoonebeek field down. Company executives reckoned that its thick, hard-to-extract crude wasn’t worth the trouble, even though only about 25% of Schoonebeek’s oil had been produced. The main evidence of the town’s petroleum past was an old-fashioned bobbing oil pump, known as a nodding donkey, which still stands in a parking lot near a bakery.

Now higher prices and technological advances are spurring a new joint venture of Shell, Exxon, and the Dutch government to pump Schoonebeek’s reserves once more. New wells drilled horizontally are coming in contact with more of the oil. Steam injected into the rock loosens up its molasses-like crude so it can be brought to the surface more easily. Shell won’t say what price it needs to make such efforts profitable, b`ut experts estimate $40 to $50 per barrel will do. At a current price of $80, the field is a clear winner. “We wouldn’t do this if the price was really low,” says Michael Lander, the Shell executive running the project. The venture is expected to produce 120 million barrels from the reopened western section of Schoonebeek over 20 years. If another section of the field is developed, the recovery rate—the share of oil that gets pumped out—would approach 50%. The industry average is 30%-35%.

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