Tag Archives: north america

Last November before the OPEC meeting, we published a 2017 US land rig count forecast, which called for about 825 US land rigs working at year-end 2017. At the time, our forecast called for sharper growth during 1H17 than consensus expectations, with the pace of activity gains leveling off during 2H17. In this …

In the recent past, US and Saudi drilling programs have exhibited an inverse relationship. The Saudis ramped aggressively into the downturn, and maintained elevated drilling levels while the US rig count crashed. Now as the US is ramping aggressively, the Saudis have toned things down a bit. Feature image credit: Instagram user …

Halliburton took an unusual step on Friday morning, hosting a conference call before the quarter ended to provide an operational update. On the call, Big Red put all other US pumpers on notice: the US is their turf and they won’t give it up easy. The company has executed a strategic pivot from …

In our previous weekly rig count update, we noted that Permian growth has been slowing and provided some thinking as to why. This week, Lower 48 drilling surged, printing its best weekly gain since January. But the Permian was notably absent from the party. We’ve got charts, stats and analysis on …

ConocoPhillips is baffled by recent dayrate hikes by the US land drillers. And they aren’t the only operators that feel this way  we take a look at what ConocoPhillips’ CEO had to say about it and explore why the operators shouldn’t feel too bad about a few grand a day …

Nothing can go up and to the right forever, especially not the rig count. The US onshore rig count fell back by six units this week. This break is actually a good thing and we explain why and break down the weekly rig count in in this post. There’s a …

Back in October, the North American land market was bracing for a seasonal slowdown into year-end. Here’s the warning Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar issued on a conference call about 6 weeks ago: “Based on current customer feedback we remain cautious around customer activity due to holiday and seasonal weather-related downtime. Our customers …

Last week, we rolled out an installment in our Thinking Ahead series taking a forward look at US production and estimating 2017 production levels. We’ve also been paying attention to operator commentary on 2017 drilling programs and capex. In this post, we add it all up and put our necks on the …

Although it may seem early to some, another fleet improvement cycle is underway for the US land rig fleet. We covered the specific upgrade programs of several leading land drillers last week in this post. It’s a relatively humble reconstruction cycle financially speaking, involving more discrete equipment upgrades than overhauls or …

As Baker prepares to exit the horsepower game, Weatherford is in no hurry to send frac packing. After reactivating 3 spreads between September to December, the company will end the year at 90% marketed utilization. Weatherford is not selling its million horsepower fleet, at least not any time soon. There’s a lot more to this story… …