Big news in the Permian Basin local sands story from a player that has remained under the radar. This will have everyone talking today… There’s a lot more to this story… Login to see the full update…  To read this update and receive our research newsletters, you must be a …

As the year draws to a close, here’s a look around the nation at the hottest onshore drilling basins and how they stack up this year on activity growth. Also included is a discussion of how the actual overall trend in US drilling compares to expectations a year ago and …

Well, after all the outcry leading up to mandate day, did anyone really expect a smooth start? On Monday December 18, soft enforcement of the new electronic logging device (ELD) rules began. We discuss what happened when shifts began in this new era and what it may mean for the …

In July, we wrote about the risk of hidden delays for trucks carrying locally sourced frac sand from new plants direct to wells, noting that some challenges are impossible to understand by simply looking at a map. These are things like stop lights, rail crossings, road quality, school zones, left …

Water sourcing comes up often in our conversations with all sorts of different Permian Basin oilfield participants these days. Extreme thirst is the tight oil industry’s open secret – sourcing is more opaque than supply chain elements like rigs, horsepower, pipe and sand. We quantify surging water use in West …

Experienced E&P strategist Paul Sparks has been thinking about the future of what today is a highly fragmented E&P industry. As the US unconventional business matures, will it always be run by 50+ public Independents and hundreds of smaller privates? Or is mass consolidation the future? History and some of …

50% of the 70 industry respondents to our recent 2018 outlook survey predicted that the US frac spread count would return to the prior cyclical high (450) next year. In our analysis of the survey results, we noted that this development would require material frac horsepower newbuild orders to be placed. …

2017 was Infill Thinking’s first full year in business. Readership growth this year has far exceeded my initial expectations, and the Infill Thinking team is honored and grateful to have earned your trust in our market intel. This year, we turned down multiple requests from oilfield companies interested in advertising …

Unimin and Fairmount Santrol have decided to combine in a merger expected to close mid-2018. The deal will create the largest frac sand supplier in the US. The merger of these two sand bellwethers has been rumored “seriously” since October and “casually” since well before that. In fact, back in …

Since April, the geo-transformation of the frac sand business has accelerated. In the following charts, we’ve taken our previously published rigs vs. mines cartographical analysis a step further. In the slideshow below, we’ve included a map of historical frac sand supply sources, the new map with three West Texas in-basin …