Tag Archives: drilling

A dramatic run up in the Saudi Arabian rig count preceded the OPEC November 2014 decision to become a price taker and defend market share. This of course triggered the biggest collapse in US drilling history. The decision to extend OPEC quotas in May was in fact predicted by just …

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 …

Last week after scouring air permit data, we identified a new sand mine site in Culberson County Texas In conversations with readers offline, the potential mine’s location has come up several times as a sticking point. Could this sand be stranded if indeed it is pointed at the frac industry? (questions …

Most industry observers now accept that the oilfield is on a path towards digitization, big data, machine learning, more integration, and automation. Instinctually, most of these same observers would probably not pick land contract drilling as a segment to lead the charge. But it has become increasingly clear to us that …

With all the talk of local sands in recent weeks, we thought it’d be worthwhile to map rigs vs. mines. Shown on our map in this update is the dispersion of the US horizontal rig count plotted against the percentage of US frac sand capacity arising from a half dozen …

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 …

US tight oil activity continues to recover in a global vacuum. Since the US rig count bottomed in May 2016, international onshore drilling is essentially flat and offshore activity is down 14%. How much longer will this be the case? We share some important charts and describe how the outlook has …

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 …

Unconventional drilling in the Permian’s Midland and Delaware Basins has been increasing at a breakneck pace since 4Q16. Horizontal rigs going back to work on Midland and Delaware formations alone account for 1/3rd of the total increase in Lower 48 rig count since September 30, 2016. Over the past five weeks or …

On March 7, National Public Radio addressed the Permian Basin’s explosive growth in a broadcast airing across 900 US radio stations. Infill Thinking founder Joseph Triepke spoke with NPR for the piece, sharing industry insider perspective on West Texas drilling and frac’ing. While we gave a nod to the recovery, we …