Hang on a bit longer, for this summer the industry began its turnaround. The long-awaited recovery moved from the back burner to the front, and more people began lining up for a taste. I think that a year from now, we’ll look back and see that the U.S. rig count seeded its comeback in the summer of 2016. Most producers’ oil and gas output will have done the same. Let’s hope their earnings per share take part as well.

It seems like we’ve woken up from a drunken, decade-long shale party that was a lot of fun, but caused one heck of a hangover. For 24 months now, we’ve been cleaning up the mess before the parents come home. Devon Energy Corp. is but the latest company to report it has reached or surpassed its asset-disposal target and scrubbed its balance sheet. Devon has divested an aggregate $3.2 billion of assets. Noble Energy Inc. has sold $775 million so far this year. Chesapeake Energy Corp. said it is edging closer to its year-end goal of divesting up to $1 billion of assets. And the list goes on.

On the other side of the ledger, a lot is happening as well. Kayne Anderson alone has put to work, in companies or acreage, $1 billion of private equity since OPEC’s 2014 Thanksgiving surprise. And about 80% of all the asset purchases year-to-date have been made by private equity-funded buyers. Many publics have successfully raised new equity to make their own purchases. Synergy Resources Corp., Rice Energy Inc., Callon Petroleum Co. and EQT Corp. come to mind.

More companies have said they’ll put a handful of rigs back to work in the second half of this year, or certainly by year-end. In recent days, Devon, Pioneer Natural Resources, Energen and Laredo Petroleum announced rig additions or increases to their 2016 capex. If oil remains around $50, the budget announcements going into 2017 should be interesting.

We’ve seen this cycle play out repeatedly during the 35 years this magazine has covered the industry. While reviewing seminal events to compile the 35-year timeline in this month’s issue, I noticed that most predictions and forecasts have been too early, too late, the wrong order of magnitude—or just plain wrong. Inevitably, the majority of people have landed on their feet during those years, wiped their brow and gotten down to work—with renewed vigor, new technical efficiencies and a vow to be smarter.

The most important lesson is to remember the errors and over-exuberance of the past boom cycles, keep debt low and prepare for a worst-case scenario, because you know it will occur at some point, and when you least expect it.

In 1981, when Oil and Gas Investor started, a significant effort was underway that few of us appreciated at the time: A wildcatter named George Mitchell was masterminding a new way to drill and produce from Texas’ tired old Fort Worth Basin. That led to the Barnett Shale, the other shales and the reinvigoration and redevelopment of traditional plays such as is going on today in the Permian Basin and Oklahoma’s Sooner Trend region.

Fast forward to 2016, and we now enjoy computing power, horizontal drilling accuracy and microseismic data to monitor ever-larger fracturing jobs. What we thought was impossible has been proven possible, in many instances. Take pad drilling and walking rigs, multilateral horizontal legs from one wellbore, zipper fracks and closer well spacing into consideration, and you can wave goodbye to peak oil.

Natural gas as a percentage of the total energy mix has now surpassed coal in powering American utilities. U.S. air emissions have dropped thanks to our increased reliance on natural gas.

There is much more to come. IHSMarkit looked at nearly 46,000 U.S. horizontal wells completed between 2010 and 2015. It studied how the unconventional drilling and completion technologies of that shale revolution could be applied to redevelop conventional wells in the top 39 established U.S. tight conventional plays, where the major shale plays are also being developed.

It found that operators are getting closer to the holy grail of recovering a bigger percentage of the oil and gas in place from these tight, conventional plays. (Next month, in our Executive Q&A, you’ll learn more about how the team at BP Lower 48 is doing just that.)

IHSMarkit study author Steve Trammel said, “Our analysis identified 25 tight conventional ‘sleeper’ plays that have been tested with only a few horizontal wells, but have average IP rates greater than 200 barrels of oil equivalent per day. In addition, shallow conventional plays may also offer opportunities for operators to leverage these unconventional technologies in the current oil price environment.”

The pot is simmering; the next year or two may take it to a full boil.

Leslie Haines can be reached at lhaines@hartenergy.com.