Posted on July 27, 2015 | By Rhiannon Meyers  mysanantonio.com

Texas remains on track to produce a record amount of crude despite the lingering downturn that’s shut down rigs and spurred oil companies to lay off tens of thousands of workers.

Even as oil companies pare their spending budgets and pull back from some drilling activity, production in Texas has continued surging toward all-time highs, said Karr Ingham, an economist for the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, at his twice-per-year assessment of the state’s oil industry on Monday.

Statewide oil output is expected to reach 1.28 billion barrels this year, exceeding the state’s record of 1.26 billion barrels set in 1972, Ingham said.

The resiliency of the state’s production numbers came as a surprise to Ingham, who had expected output to fall along with oil prices. Last July, before crude collapsed, Ingham predicted that Texas would break its 1972 record within two years.

After prices declined and hundreds of rigs were idled, Ingham began to doubt his forecast. But producers have continued to wrangle more oil from the ground than they did a year ago, with output in Texas ticking up 17 percent from the same time last year. That’s despite a 45 percent decline in the price for domestic benchmark crude.

“I don’t see any way at all now that we don’t continue to grow production in Texas for the balance of the year,” he said. “We certainly have for the first part of the year. It almost can’t drop fast enough to keep this from happening.”