The U.S. oil patch has long been unique in the world. Free enterprise, free-flowing capital, fee lands and fair regulations have allowed entrepreneurial start-ups and family oil companies to drill wells and earn their fortunes. We once wrote of an ambitious guy with a dream, whose first office consisted of a room with a card table, a phone and a dairy box to sit on. Leslie Haines

But has the game now changed? Today, the U.S. is fast becoming a province of significantly larger recoverable oil and gas resources, traditional and unconventional. These are going to be aggressively developed, but they require big-ticket drilling campaigns that include expensive fracturing, across vast swaths of land.

The plays made up of onesies and twosies, a few vertical wells here and there, are becoming rare. Does this leave out the traditional small-cap producer? If developing a play means dealing with thousands of acres and having to spend millions of dollars per well, can that only be done by the big boys? Where does that leave the scrappy little guys?

Consider the Eagle Ford. A Texas A&M University economist recently said that in this shale alone, people estimate 20,000 wells need to be drilled to produce the oil and gas resources in the play. With about 1,250 wells capable of being drilled in one year, it would thus take about 16 years to reach that goal. This doesn't factor in the well downspacing that will likely occur, and it doesn't mention how many operators will be using rigs at any given point in time.

Is there room for a small guy to inch his way into this play and drill a few wells, because the big boys just can't get to them all in a timely fashion?

There is no doubt a natural limit to the pace of development activity that can take place, thanks to the availability of enough rig hands, rigs, frac crews, trucks, water and all other supplies. Drilling efficiencies are paramount and they are being chased by everyone involved. Rig and service costs are coming down in all plays.

But increasingly today, the smaller guys are standing at the end of the line for getting rigs and services. And, they probably cannot afford to spend $7-, $8-, $10 million on a single well unless they are backed by a private-equity giant.

Traditionally the majority of smaller private independents were gas-oriented, unless they operated out in Midland. Are they consigned to producing out the long tail, or to selling out altogether because the game is getting so expensive?

Years ago, long before this shale gale hit, a prominent consultant told me that someday, consolidation in the oil patch—and the shuffling of assets—would lead to a new paradigm, where only two or three large companies would dominate a play or basin, driving out most of the others. Companies would become more focused. A current example might be Southwestern Energy Corp., which dominates the Fayetteville shale. Although the company is also in the Marcellus and other plays to a lesser degree, you hear SWN and you think Fayetteville immediately.

Are the smaller guys consigned to slow growth in production, high decline rates on older wells, unforeseen delays, waiting on a rig, a frac job or hook-up to midstream infrastructure ?

The game is changing, and yet, we think the small entrepreneurial company will always find a place in the patch. Every day you hear of start-ups that began with an idea and some leasing, and maybe two rigs, and four years later they sell for $600 million. It really depends on the play and how savvy the CEO is in obtaining capital.

We have no doubt that mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Apache Corp. was started with just $250,000, albeit in 1954 when that kind of money had more buying power than it does today.

Focusing on the best is key for any company at every stage of its life cycle. "Floyd Wilson's successful approach to running an E&P company, in which a relentless focus is placed on high-grading the asset base, hasn't been forgotten with (the new) Halcon Resources either. Expect HK's current exposure to 12 basins to get trimmed to five or six basins by the end of 2013," Global Hunter Securities analyst Mike Kelly says in a recent research note.

Then again you could be very lucky, as Gulf-port Energy Corp. apparently is—its first three Utica wells in Ohio have turned out to be the three highest-flowing ones in the play to date. What a boost to find out you have leased acreage in the very best zip code around. Was it luck, your savvy geology work-up, or happenstance? Were these the leases you could get, after the big boys came in all around you?

Smart and lucky, with the right technology and the right capitalization, is the magic equation that will turn any small guy into a success.