Thinking Ahead

Over the next nine months, Permian Basin frac sand miners will need to hire hundreds of workers to staff up the new mines they have planned. With the Permian Basin oilfield labor market already white hot and all the new hires slated for a sparsely populated area, where will the …

We actively monitor spending patterns for approximately 50 public independent operators. With virtually all of their 1Q17 results disclosed over the past week or two, we can now report some detailed insights on what their spending during the first quarter of the year means for the rest of 2017. There’s a lot …

Earnings season begins Friday morning. Here’s our cheat sheet of just the most important themes and trends to listen for as management teams discuss the outlook. We’ve broken down the cheat sheet by US onshore E&P, majors, completion service providers, frac sand miners, onshore drilling, offshore drilling, and diversified oilfield services, …

Traveling down W FM Road 1787 south of Odessa before Hwy 349,  a well-worn dirt road wide enough for two-way traffic cuts off the main road. About two miles down this dirt road lies a monster. This is the site of Encana’s Davidson multi-well pad – a Permian phenomenon. It is the …

This past weekend, we read a half dozen transcripts of earnings calls from the oil majors and national oil companies (NOCs). The big guys are all whistling the same tune. They are successfully re-engineering pending deepwater projects to fit $50 oil (and below). They are ready to clear their final investment decision …

As we write, the US onshore rig count is breaching the 700 mark (it stood at 689 last week). In this update, we explore what happens when a rig count of 900 is reached (which could happen sooner than you might think). We dig into the details of how much …

Here at Infill Thinking, we don’t forecast the price of oil – we focus on oilfield activity, markets, and companies. But we do regularly talk to some of the best crude oil minds in the business. When they share noteworthy observations, we pass them along. So when one of these …

In the first months of the downturn, we began warning that a workforce designed for $100 oil is not the same one needed at $50 oil. However, the oilfield service industry right sized extremely quickly to lower activity levels over the past two years. We’ll soon see just how surgical these cuts …

Two years into the downturn and at oil prices just half of prior highs, the US tight oil industry has begun to stage a recovery. We’ve all seen this new optimism in the tangible data. Rig count, capex, headcount, frac utilization – these are just a few of the US …

If OPEC’s November 30th decision to cut production was like adding tinder to smoldering embers, then progress made over this past weekend was like dumping gasoline on the fire. Lower 48 oilfield activity will gather steam (and quickly) in early-2017. As the upstream supply chain tightens early in the new year, …