Last week, first Schlumberger and then Halliburton issued US onshore profit warnings for their completions businesses. Halliburton explicitly cited the frac sand supply crunch caused by railroad downtime as the primary culprit. Since then, we’ve had a chance to catch up with multiple private participants in this market to try …
Read More »Super-Size Me – With Vest Halfway Ramped Up, Black Mountain Ups The Ante Again
We met with Black Mountain’s management team on location in the Permian Basin last week. During our mine tour, we learned exclusive details about the company’s recent operational performance and new objectives for 2018/2019. There’s a lot more to this story… Login to see the full update… To read this …
Read More »Permian Points Part 1: In-Basin Sand Spot Pricing Discussion & The Race For Seventh Place
In addition to taking it all in from the West Texas roads this week, we’ve met with management at four in-basin sand mines, two OFS firms, and a regional transportation alliance. We also hosted a well-attended reader meetup in Odessa yesterday and have two more frac sand mine visits behind …
Read More »Key Takeaways From The Petroleum Connection’s 3rd Annual Frac Sand Industry Update
Last Friday, we mixed with 150 attendees at the frac sand industry conference hosted by the Petroleum Connection in Houston. The event was oversubscribed – there was a waiting list of 20+ potential attendees. Here are our key takeaways from the conference. There’s a lot more to this story… Login …
Read More »Are US Frac Sand Carloads Peaking? Big Rail Execs Eye In-Basin Sand For Both Risks & Opportunities
Along with earnings last week, Union Pacific reported that their minerals volume increased 71% in the quarter, driven by an increase of over 100% in sand shipments due to improving well completions and increased proppant intensity per well. How long will the growth in railed sand shipments last and what …
Read More »After A Few More In-Basin IPOs Like Vista, Frac Sand Stocks Will Outnumber Offshore Drillers 2 To 1
Late Friday afternoon, Vista Proppants and Logistics formally announced their intent to go public. The Vista S-1 is packed with interesting revelations. If you don’t have several hours to pore over its 278 pages, here are our CliffsNotes: There’s a lot more to this story… Login to see the full …
Read More »Ghosts Of Frac Sand Past, Present, And Future [Rigs vs. Mines Maps]
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 …
Read More »US Silica Customer: “Most West Texas Frac Sand Mine Sites Are Just A Wooden Shack At The End Of A Long Dirt Road”
US Silica reported better than expected 3Q17 and a very strong outlook for 2018 Monday evening. Tuesday morning on the conference call, we recorded market insights on SandBox, West Texas capacity, updates on US Silica’s Crane & Lamesa plants, 2018 overall demand, contracting activity, the outlook for Northern White, among …
Read More »New Discussion: If Risks Hypothetically Derail In-Basin Sand Supply, Will Permian Transload Capacity Be Enough?
There is a new discussion topic over in our members-only discussion forum today. Click here to read the full thread and discuss In it we ponder whether enough Permian transload capacity is in place to service demand growth if in-basin frac sand mines fall short of expectations. Understandably, investment appetite …
Read More »Oilfield Reaction To The Looming ELD Regulations
On Monday morning this week, we sent out an email survey to a select group of industry insiders who subscribe to Infill Thinking. We asked these folks to provide feedback anonymously on the risk to oilfield activity posed by phase-in of electronic logging device regs this December. We got some insightful …
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