Thinking Ahead

Epic quantities of frac sand and water will fracture a lot of low permeability rock in the Lower 48 this year. This same sand and water has also fractured the US oilfield supply chain. Conventional wisdom on market segmentation and task ownership is now being challenged. The chain of custody …

Many of our subscribers have descended upon Fort Worth this week for the large Permian Basin executive confab going on there. We’ve prepared the following “cheat sheet” of talking points in advance of the event. We tried to go a layer deeper than the agenda in this exercise, focusing on …

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We devote a lot of bandwith to the most pressing concerns facing tight oil development here at Infill Thinking. In the long-run, other constraints rise on the horizon. These are the big picture sustainability sort of questions for tight oil development. In this post, we list these big picture issues …

If new Eagle Ford frac sand producers execute on the plans we’ve uncovered, then South Texas completions activity could be fully supplied with local proppant in the near future. That’s what the summation of our research suggests. In this report you’ll find a detailed data driven accounting of what we …

The very latest on what the 5th largest pressure pumping company in the US is doing to their fleet to try and capitalize on a hot market. The strategy doesn’t involve newbuilds, but it does include some interesting tweaks. There’s a lot more to this story… To read this update …

Ironically, all the recent talk of restraint by tight oil operators is a contributing factor to the recent crude oil price rally. In turn, rising oil prices will put to the test this newfound US operator resolve to reign in the willy nilly spending of prior upcycles. With WTI an …

Since New Year’s Day, ~40 fresh IR decks have hit the wires from the O&G industry… and that doesn’t even include downstream or midstream. The presentation dump came ahead of the year’s first significant O&G investor conference this week. We have cherry-picked the following datapoints with 2018 implications from public …

A year from now, 20 new Permian frac sand mines could be operational if all build-out plans unfold as expected. Many risks linger in this story, particularly surety of supply at the wellhead and downhole performance. But let’s imagine for a moment a future world where the West Texas frac sand …

We believe the following 20 questions encapsulate the transcendent themes facing the US oilfield service market during 2018. These are not in any particular order. We have included plenty of context and background for each question, but we stopped short of answering them. As the new year begins, so much can still …