Infill Thoughts

On Wednesday afternoon this week, we had a chance to touch base with ProFrac executives to learn about their ambitious 2018 growth plan. Infill Thinking spoke by phone with Ladd Wilks and Matt Wilks – Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of ProFrac, respectively. Here’s what we learned… There’s a …

This year, we’ve found it helpful to keep an eye on the frac spread count (FSC) maintained by Primary Vision, Inc. So we called our friend Matt Johnson, a principal at the data firm that maintains the FSC, to learn more about how this metric came to be and the methodology behind …

Subscribers will relive a lively year of action by seeing the top research updates Infill Thinking published this year. We also revisit the amazing guest posts shared by 21 contributing subscribers this year. Our readers are the smartest in the business! There’s a lot more to this story… Login to …

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 …

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 …