Is Peak Permian only 3 years away?

Apart from geological constraints, other factors that could affect Permian growth are increasing service costs and potentially persistently low oil prices.

While oil service margins have increased for oil field service providers such Schlumberger and Halliburton, oil producers, on the other hand, face cost pressure, and "higher well costs may force additional discussion on capital discipline going into 2018, which could be a good thing for the overall supply and demand balance," BTU Analytics said earlier this month.

At the end of September, Moody's warned that even if average drilling and completion costs have declined significantly in the past two years, "drillers will be hard pressed to further reduce drill-bit finding and development costs, since drilling efficiencies may be offset by higher service costs." North American oil producers will need WTI at over $50 a barrel in order to achieve "meaningful capital efficiency", Moody's said.

Pioneer Natural Resources, for example, continues to believe in the Permian, but it thinks that the U.S. shale patch is heading toward hitting the ceiling of efficiency gains from larger frackings.

"In the U.S., we are essentially using a sledgehammer approach. We are using larger volumes or sand and fluids and pumping at higher rates," Pioneer's CEO Tim Dove said at the Oil & Money conference in London, as quoted by Platts.

"At some point you reach a peak on logistics, limits on sand, water volumes... that's where we are getting to, [although] we're not quite there as an industry," Dove noted.

Still, the expertise of the majors, as well as science and tech breakthroughs in proppant use, may help the Permian outgrow its growing pains faster than expected.