I work in surface production facilities (rather than reservoir) but I think this article misses the point by a long margin. For the vast majority of oil reservoirs, shutting in is good for production. The reason is fairly intuitive - you drill into the oil-bearing part of the reservoir which is in the middle (beneath the gas but above the water). When you suck on the oil, you pull water and gas through with it ("coning") but when you stop, it all settles down again. When you restart production you get more oil (valuable) and less gas (far less value, possibly worthless) and less water (worthless).

Lifting costs vary a great deal but for my high-cost-of-living part of the world, we still don't spend more than about $20 a barrel to produce the oil. Most of the world would be far less.

I think for the vast majority of the oil industry, we still make a small profit on low oil prices. The economics of oil production is really that you spend a shitload up front (CAPEX) and then your continuing costs (OPEX) are an order of magnitude smaller.

And as our CEO said recently, when prices are low everybody expects to rise back to what we're used to again soon, because we're naturally optimistic. But that's not a law written in stone, it might be true that oil prices drop again in future, so we're better off selling it today.

Also what they mentioned about waxy pipelines doesn't affect most facilities. Usually we would do a shock biocide dose for preservation, which is not a particularly high cost. And if you've got a waxy crude, you're probably going to get your wax issue within 12-24 hours anyway as soon as you cool to ambient, so a long shut-in and a short shut-in would be dealt with similarly.