The frac market is in flux. Who’s still planning to grow? Who’s not? Will plans be realized? We quantify and discuss… There’s a lot more to this story… To read this update and receive our research newsletters, you must be a subscriber. If your free trial has expired, renew here. (Current members login here.) Subscribers get …

Last week an executive affiliated with the newest acquirer on the frac sand block emailed us to let us know they are targeting frac sand logistics assets. During our phone conversation with the acquisition firm, we learned that… There’s a lot more to this story… To read this update and receive …

Frac sand mining is evolving rapidly and the oilfield service company role in it is changing too. See what we expect to happen next in the full update. There’s a lot more to this story… To read this update and receive our research newsletters, you must be a subscriber. If your …

Schlumberger will kick off oilfield service earnings season with their conference call on Friday July 20, with Halliburton’s report following on the next business day. Here are the top themes we will be listening for on 2Q18 conference calls: There’s a lot more to this story… To read this update …

In the Permian Basin, frac sand mines took off with very little permitting friction. In fact, if you take the dunes sagebrush lizard out of the conversation, we actually can’t recall a single headline about regulatory hurdles slowing down project. Will the same be true as the Mid-Con mining story …

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 …

Login required. There’s a lot more to this story… To read this update and receive our research newsletters, you must be a subscriber. If your free trial has expired, renew here. (Current members login here.) Subscribers get Exclusive research update newsletters High-caliber, data-driven analysis and commentary New angles on stories you’ll only find here No advertisements, no …

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 …