Infill Thoughts

As usual, NOV’s earnings call last week provided detailed color on the oilfield supply chain. CEO Clay Williams always does a good job of taking listeners inside his manufacturing shops around the oil patch. If there is iron in the oilfield, there’s a good chance at least some part of …

If deepwater rig demand were to begin its ascent today, it would be met with a glut of rigs that would render the impact on dayrates, and indeed contractor bottom lines, relatively impotent. If more rigs aren’t removed from the structural oversupply before demand moves higher, drilling contractors are at risk …

Most industry observers now accept that the oilfield is on a path towards digitization, big data, machine learning, more integration, and automation. Instinctually, most of these same observers would probably not pick land contract drilling as a segment to lead the charge. But it has become increasingly clear to us that …

Can lower quality, logistically advantage frac sand deposits take on and potentially displace Northern White supply railed into the hottest completions markets? This question has quickly rocketed up the controversy leader-board, becoming one of the most hotly contested debates in the entire upstream industry today. As the first industry publication …

With 27 oilfield earnings reports this week, including a dozen conference calls on Thursday alone, C-suites across the patch opened the information flood gates. We continue to pore over transcripts and 10-Qs. For this update, we are driving right on past the usual suspects. Laterals are getting longer, sand’s expensive and …

On ExxonMobil’s conference call Friday, we will be listening for talking points on two key development areas in particular: the Permian Basin and the deepwater Liza development offshore Guyana. The Liza development is especially important as it is one of the first major deepwater projects that is moving forward since the …

US Silica hosted a positive call to kick off 1Q17 earnings season for the frac sand industry this morning. The outlook provided was bullish for both demand and pricing. The company’s commentary on the emerging Permian local sands market both validated our own thesis and introduced cautionary notes into the …

So far in the upcycle, the well cost inflation discussion has largely focused on hydraulic fracturing pricing (both HHP / stage pricing and consumables). Rightly so, as leading edge price per stage has essentially doubled year-over-year. Prices for surface casing and tubing (collectively OCTG) are rising cyclically as well and the market is …

With all the talk of local sands in recent weeks, we thought it’d be worthwhile to map rigs vs. mines. Shown on our map in this update is the dispersion of the US horizontal rig count plotted against the percentage of US frac sand capacity arising from a half dozen …

If you ever want to nerd-out, visit Core Lab’s Houston facility. After a tour, you’ll understand why “lab” is part of their name. This is the highest-IQ company in oilfield service. They are also closer to operators’ rock than any other service firm. Core Lab is not a pressure pumping …