Infill Thoughts

Inside of 24 hours, two highly leveraged US onshore oilfield services companies – Basic Energy Services and Key Energy Services – each delivered Chapter 11 bankruptcy news to the market. Neither development comes as a surprise as both companies have been working on restructuring arrangements for the better part of 2016. But the timing …

Transocean’s fleet status report released late Monday afternoon showed that three more midwater semis have been selected for scrapping. At Infill Thinking, we now track 98 offshore rigs that have been retired since the downturn began in 2014. These 98 include the Transocean Driller, Transocean Winner and Sedco 704, which Transocean now plans to scrap this quarter. …

For the first time in more than two years, it feels pretty good to be a North American land drilling contractor right about now. Beyond the headline rig count increases we’ve all heard of, other important industry metrics are moving upwards as well. The North American land drillers are the tip of the spear …

On Schlumberger’s conference call Friday morning, CEO Paal Kibsgaard made one central theme very clear. He is preparing his organization for growth again. Conversations with almost every Schlumberger customer on pricing increases have begun. Outside of Asia Pacific, Kibsgaard sees tender shoots of recovery sprouting in every market across the globe. There’s a …

Much has been said lately about deepwater lagging onshore in any sort of recovery. Rightly so, particularly for new drilling. But this doesn’t mean deepwater is dead in the water. Instead, it means the recovery could look quite a bit different this time. We got some clues about the equipment mix shift …

On Wednesday, Halliburton kicked off earnings season with a tidy report that boosted the stock by 5%. In other posts, we covered our key takeaways from the press release and a significant tone shift that has implications for future upcycles. Seven key observations about the competitive landscape are discussed here, but first we pause for …

An important tone shift in how Halliburton addressed investors Wednesday morning foreshadows a different type of recovery ahead. Reading between the lines, we’ve dubbed the upcycle of the future a “roll up your sleeves” recovery. What will oilfield companies have to do to achieve prior KPIs in the recovery ahead? We discuss that and more… There’s …

Recent financing news from several large offshore drillers suggests that it is becoming more difficult for the battered sector to access the capital markets. With a wave of credit instruments approaching maturity over the next 3-5 years, the sector’s collateral ($100bn worth of newbuild rigs) is increasingly economically impaired (paybacks periods are …

Saipem won 30 years of new land rig backlog in Saudi Arabia today. In the US, we estimate about 28 rig-years of land drilling backlog have been added in total since the bottom. We compare the Saudi and US drilling markets, and estimate backlog created in the young and tender recovery. …

A quick round-up of three stories flying below the radar that we find important lessons in: i) a leading indicator of Norwegian mature field development just plummeted, ii) H&P just paid an injured rig hand $72mm, and iii) Patterson-UTI is finding it easy to return idle land rigs to work. …