Permian acreage values are changing rapidly, frustrating those who want in and providing a windfall to incumbent operators. What some are calling an acreage valuation bubble in the Permian may be just the tip of an inflation iceberg in the play. A tsunami of capital targeting deals in the region …

For service and drilling contractors that want a piece of Saudi Aramco’s $30bn annual budget, a line has been drawn in the desert sand. As we write, the NOC is making some of its first big moves to make good on an ambitious local content plan unveiled about a year ago. …

Last week, we rolled out an installment in our Thinking Ahead series taking a forward look at US production and estimating 2017 production levels. We’ve also been paying attention to operator commentary on 2017 drilling programs and capex. In this post, we add it all up and put our necks on the …

The biggest regional contributor to the US Shale Revolt will be the Permian Basin. The Permian is the only unconventional oil play where production has not fallen in the downturn. In fact, Permian production today is up 13% since that fateful OPEC meeting two years ago. Following it’s conventional production …

The period from 2009-2014 was affectionately dubbed the US Shale Revolution. During the “revolution,” 40 years of American production declines were reversed in 5 with horizontal drilling and fracing. The revolution was a capital-intensive growth phase enabled by high oil prices. Today, we submit a new term to describe the …

On Wednesday morning (11/16), Weatherford sold 84.5mm shares at $5.40/share in a registered direct equity offering for $456mm. Last week, Infill Thinking predicted that Weatherford would raise equity capital following the stock’s 33%+ gain on CEO Bernard Duroc-Danner’s departure. The market reacted positively to today’s equity raise, Weatherford’s stock rising another 3% …

Two months ago, we penned a deep dive on the offshore drilling outlook, concluding that things still must get worse before they get better. Atwood’s conference call yesterday provided a good theory test, and we came away with confirmation of our multi-year hard landing view. Here are the most important fundamental …

In the decade we’ve been covering the oil business, we can’t recall another period of time when technology and efficiency gains were occurring this fast. And as students of this industry, we’d argue that there’s been no time in history when O&G industry methods were advancing at today’s pace. Globally, human …

There were a lot of smart things about the Nabors analyst day last week. One of those was the timing. Nabors was smart to host its event after most of the other contract drillers hosted their earnings conference calls in the weeks leading up to the event – the timing …

On Thursday, we attended an all-day event hosted by Nabors Industries in Houston for analysts and investors that follow the company. Nabors went all out on this one, rolling out a 160-slide deck at a full day event that included nine presentations from senior Nabors executives, a rich multi-media campaign, and a half …