Infill Thoughts

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 …

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. …

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 …

On Wednesday, the fierce competition that has characterized the Permian Basin frac sand rush all year will be put on hold for a couple hours. We have exclusive details on why and what’s going on in this update…   There’s a lot more to this story… Login to see the …

For more than two years, the North American Energy industry has struggled with low prices. Companies have idled workers and equipment, squeezed vendors, and taken additional cost cutting measures. But our problem isn’t oil prices. Rather, it’s the self-inflicted costs.   There’s a lot more to this story… Login to …

On Tuesday, we warned that by taking their foot of the capex gas pedal at this point in the cycle, the Independents risk ceding share in shale development to the Majors. On Wednesday, Chevron’s 2018 budget release confirmed that this indeed will happen if actions follow words. There’s a lot …

During recent conversations with several Permian Basin industry contacts, we caught wind that a new fresh water entrant is marketing third party fresh water via pipeline to the new construction frac sand mines going in around Kermit. We did a bit more digging and then called the company and received …