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Read More »H&P Addresses Their New “Piggy Back” Land Rigs, Which Are Still In Experimentation Mode
About 10 days before the H&P conference call this week, we wrote a report about something new the land contract driller is doing in the field – an onshore drilling first. In that report on these so called “piggy-back rigs,” we suggested H&P management might introduce and talk extensively about this …
Read More »Four US Land Drillers Own More Than Half The Active Rigs [Market Share Charts]
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 …
Read More »H&P Buys Their Way Into The High-Tech Drilling Arms Race
Helmerich & Payne, the clear first mover in the last rig technology cycle, has been more “middle of the pack” this time. Until now. This week, H&P bought their way into the high tech drilling conversation with the acquisition of MOTIVE Drilling Technologies. The last time H&P press released an …
Read More »If April Showers Bring May Flowers, What Do Permits In March Bring?
About a month ago, we noticed a material spike in permitting activity for horizontal wells in the Permian Basin. Based on historical data, the March spike suggested that the Permian horizontal rig count could increase further 25%. We look at what’s happened since then, and update our permitting analysis for April data in this …
Read More »Could Today’s Land Drilling Leader Become Tomorrow’s Laggard?
Helmerich & Payne’s FlexRig3s have made the company the best-in-class US land driller for a decade. Ask any analyst who the best land driller with the best fleet is and they’ll say H&P almost unanimously. But will that always be the case? Now for the first time in a decade, management is having …
Read More »The Two Main Reasons Why A US Land Rig Fleet Renovation Has Begun
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 …
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