Low oil prices present the shale industry with a problem: how to keep production up while trying to push costs down.

One possible solution is refracturing existing wells. It sounds simple, elegant and logical: if output is declining in an oil or natural gas well, and hydraulic fracturing the well prodded it to produce initially sizeable volumes, then operators should just refracture it, i.e. shale’s version of enhanced oil recovery.

Refractures, popularly known as “refracs,” have snagged industry’s interest recently as oil prices in the US — where the majority of shale wells are located — have stubbornly bobbed around the $50/barrel mark. The reasoning is that since the all-in cost of most horizontal wells sport price tags of $8 million and up, and refracs can run roughly 25% of that sum or about $2 million if done correctly, refracs make a lot of sense.

And since upwards of 100,000 oil wells have been fracked in North America during the last four years, according to some studies, a sizeable portion of those may be able to be refracked, proponents say.

The idea has had support from many parts of industry for years. For example, ExxonMobil’s US shale subsidiary XTO Energy, in a presentation to the North Dakota Petroleum Council annual meeting in 2011, said refracs in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota and Montana appeared “economically and operationally effective” and were especially successful in wells with inefficient completions.