Infill Thoughts

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 …

With Schlumberger’s earnings call this morning, oilfield earnings season is officially underway. CEO Paal Kibsgaard addressed several of the themes we expect to dominate the conversation this earnings season including US price increases and activity strength and maybe over-exuberance, sluggish international conditions, aggressive frac reactivation, new business models in offshore drilling, …

  This update started with three qualitative observations we wrote about over the past several days. These sent us back into the spreadsheets for today’s piece. We sliced and diced drilling data to expound on Haynesville green shoots, a Delaware Basin push, and frac sand valuation commentaries. There’s a lot more …

Back in early-March, we wrote to subscribers that a frac sand miner was evaluating a deposit outside San Antonio to serve the Eagle Ford (see point 1 here), something we picked up on the sidelines of the industry’s leading conference. This morning, Emerge Energy Services announced they’ve closed an Eagle Ford …

It won’t come as a surprise to most of our readers that a slew of O&G IPOs are coming to market. Instead of rubbing our hands together with excitement, perhaps we should be wringing them in worry. We are now monitoring about 20 US onshore oilfield IPO deals collectively sized at …

In this update, we provide a round up of Wall Street frac sand demand projections for 2017 and 2018 and discuss how the forecasts have evolved dramatically over the past 4-6 weeks. We also discuss whether the leading edge estimates are even possible for the industry to deliver on. There’s …

Drilling permit data from March showed increased operator appetite for drilling and more room to run for the rig count. We share a chart capturing the trend and break down the permit data into actionable analysis on hot spots and top operators. There’s a lot more to this story… To …

Along with many others in the industry, we actively monitor the Haynes & Boone Spring borrowing base re-determination survey each year. Released this week, the law firm’s latest survey suggests that bankers have shrugged off the capital destruction left by the downturn’s 120 O&G bankruptcies. There’s a lot more to this …

Thanks in part to the renewed exploration push in the UK, Transocean just announced two new contracts for the Transocean Spitsbergen (a 2009-built UDW HDHE semi) for Statoil drilling programs. The dayrate is near break-even, but that’s the least interesting thing about these contract awards… Digging deeper, a $27mm difference in the contract …