Infill Thoughts

Everything seems lined up for an incredible 2H17 for US completion service providers. Everything except for oil prices. In a week of rampant pessimism, our obligatory negative post introduces several new developments you won’t read about anywhere else including what one of the biggest pressure pumpers in the market is telling …

The big data hype machine can be powerful, and it’s tempting to believe that building and maintaining an effective analytic capability is effortless, with limitless benefits. Today, every company in the oilfield is in the midst of a tech / big data / automation overhaul. In this guest post, Steve …

Over the past several weeks, we have spoken with many industry contacts close to the Permian Basin frac sand mining scene. Our channel checks have revealed insights on geology, plant progress, challenges, and contracting activity. In a two part series starting today and concluding next week, we are chronicling some …

We don’t take the EIA data on completions and DUCs (drilled but uncompleted wells) at face value. But we do look at their work for directional trends on DUCs, which can be a good leading indicator for trends in frac horsepower demand. In this update, you’ll find our analysis of this week’s …

Last week, the US land rig count breached 900 (stands at 902). We are now at the level Halliburton famously pronounced “the new equilibrium” one year ago. We address what this means for completions, frac horsepower, and US oil production in this update. There’s a lot more to this story… Login to see the …

Each Friday in June, we are passing the keyboard to one of our readers to share perspective from the field. This week, Ron Davis weighs on on a classic business conundrum in deepwater. The drilling contractors have, in an effort to downplay the daunting oversupply (and possibly drive down distressed …

A dramatic run up in the Saudi Arabian rig count preceded the OPEC November 2014 decision to become a price taker and defend market share. This of course triggered the biggest collapse in US drilling history. The decision to extend OPEC quotas in May was in fact predicted by just …

Is frac sand replacing rigs? It would appear so in the US onshore recovery. As unconventional drilling and completion science evolves, the industry’s surface footprint per barrel of oil produced is shrinking. A growing sub-surface footprint (which we can measure with sand) is replacing the surface sprawl. With the US onshore …

In the Permian Basin, horizontal drilling activity is up 101 rigs so far this year. This is more than 2x the next fastest growing play (Eagle Ford +41). In this week’s Infill Thinking rig count update, we get granular on Permian growth. We’ve ranked the counties across the Permian’s basin trifecta …

Is it counterintuitive to view a court ruling against an industry participant’s expansion plans as a good thing? Yes. However, in a niche where oversupply fears have crushed the stocks of publicly traded incumbents, maybe a legal governor on the expansion plans of the few can serve the greater good. …