Infill Thoughts

Infill Thinking staff spent a full week in the Permian Basin in August 2017, touring facilities and visiting with contacts and management teams. We’ve collected 43 “quick hits” – crowd sourced datapoints and general market observations. Our time in the Permian was spent on the completions supply chain, particularly around …

Some Infill Thinking readers may have known the High Roller name even before the company became a player in the Permian Basin sand rush. High Roller is the parent company of a diverse mix of oilfield businesses including waste water hauling, SWDs, sand transloading, and man camps. The firm is …

Tomorrow another new area sand producer will host a job fair in Odessa. We expect there will be quite a few more of these job fairs at area hotels before year-end. See what some local mines are doing to recruit staff and also the competition and challenges for talent that …

This update is Infill Thinking’s fourth and final installment of crowd sourced datapoints and firsthand observations from our Permian visit last week. Most of our field trips in the Permian this time were focused on the new sand mining efforts around Kermit and logistics/storage from transload to wellsite. Subscribers have …

The US onshore rig market continues to consolidate not because of M&A but thanks to the dominance of horizontal drilling and rig specification escalation. In the four charts below, we share a time series of market share charts for Nabors Industries, Patterson-UTI, Helmerich & Payne and Precision Drilling. There’s a …

Since the Texas Comptroller’s letter singled out sand producers last week, West Texas miners have been inundated with questions. Investors and customers alike are becoming more concerned than ever about the trend’s exposure to Dune Sagebrush Lizard (DSL) habitat. We provide highlights from one company’s response supplemented with our firsthand knowledge from a …

In this update, more from our recent trip behind the scenes in the Permian Basin frac sand mining build-out including contract price datapoints, lizard talk, a mine location identified, and trucking observations and deductions. There’s a lot more to this story… Login to see the full update…  To read this …

Crowd sourced datapoints and firsthand observations from our Permian visit this week are being shared in a series of “quick hits.” These bullet point lists include field-level market intelligence on wellsite trends, the frac sand mining rush, and the Permian oilfield at large. There’s a lot more to this story… …

This week we miled up the rental car, dirtied up the steel toes, and took it all in out in the Permian Basin. General market observations from our Permian visit will be provided via several installments of these “quick hit” pieces as we process and compile what we’ve learned. Our …

The letter’s rhetoric will almost certainly cause some market observers to start taking the under on how much Permian sand is actually going to make it out of local mines. It will almost certainly be looked back on as a starting point for more formal environmental opposition. We summarize the …