The oil and gas industry is sounding a little like the dueling banjos scene from Deliverance, the 1970s classic film about a lower Appalachian recreational canoe trip that takes an unexpected turn.

Most in the oil patch have enough gray hair to remember that the movie's fateful canoe trip begins with a quick competitive musical duet after one of the recreationalists engages a local banjo prodigy in a serendipitous jam session.

The oil and gas version of dueling banjos is playing onstage today at conferences around the domestic oil patch. It features competing solos by big name CEOs touting their positions in America's best oil play.

For example, Noble Energy Inc. CEO Charles Davidson told attendees at the 2013 Howard Weil Energy Conference in New Orleans about progress Noble has made in optimizing oil production in the East Pony portion of the Niobrara shale, northeast of Denver. That area, Davidson told attendees, "has truly evolved into the premier U.S. oil play" because of the large volume of in-place resources—90 million barrels per section—and low F&D costs, which creates an oilfield with "the highest net present value per unit of production."

Noble will devote 45% of its 2013 capex to the Niobrara and add another 1,100 horizontal wells over the next five years. (See cover story in this issue.)

Three hours later, EOG Resources Inc. CEO Mark Papa outlined for Howard Weil attendees how downspacing in the black-oil window of the Eagle Ford would generate "the biggest U.S. crude oil discovery net to one company in the past 40 years." Papa is a proud parent in South Texas, where downspacing has captured 2.2 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

"What more can I say about the Eagle Ford other than it is the best play in North America—bar none," Papa said.

Not to be outdone, Continental Resources, Inc. CEO Harold Hamm is telling investors that the addition of four lower benches in the Three Forks-Sanish beneath the Bakken shale in North Dakota has created a "world-class" field with up to 30 billion barrels of recoverable oil, in a play covering 15,000 square miles.

In contrast, no one at Hart Energy's April 2013 DUG Permian Conference and Exhibition in Fort Worth made overt claims about America's best—or biggest—oil play. However, Pioneer Natural Resources Co. CEO Scott Sheffield floated a new number on the potential in the Midland Basin's rapidly unfolding horizontal Wolfcamp shale play. Sheffield predicted that production would generate 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil, a figure that does not include horizontal Wolfcamp potential just over the Central Basin Platform in the Delaware Basin.

Obviously, the horizontal Wolfcamp shale is just tuning up in West Texas before it steps up for its own solo on the North American oil stage.

Discussion of biggest—or best—oil can make any listener's head spin. However, the significance is not about deciding which oil play in North America is biggest, or best. Rather, it is the bigger picture. As an industry, we are just three years removed from that moment in time when energy executives first began branding strategic plans to go "liquids rich."

Prior to April 2010, the excitement domestically was all about "all gas, all the time." And for most of the new liquids-rich era, a preponderance of talk has been about revenue stream, as wide differentials in commodity prices boosted the financial contribution from crude oil while simultaneously eroding the value of dry gas.

In other words, a company could be overwhelmingly dry natural gas in its production profile, but a small contribution from oil or natural gas liquids generated a majority of a company's revenue because of the breakdown in the ratio between how commodity markets valued the Btu content in oil versus gas.

Now, three years later, companies are stating unequivocally that they are liquids rich in actual production with more on the way. And it is the finger-picking speed of that industry transformation that has listeners on Wall Street doing an impromptu jig.

Remember, too, that estimates in the Bakken and Permian Basin are based on recovering only 3% of the original oil in place, which illustrates both the potential—and the challenges—of tight oil.

A 1% or 2% increase out of some 50 billion barrels in recoverable oil could prompt additional CEOs to tune up the investor relations strings on their public presentation banjos.

For more coverage of DUG Permian, see.