Drilling activity

Punxsutawney Phil presaged six more weeks of winter when he saw his shadow on February 2, the famous groundhog’s annual attempt to predict the arrival of spring that garners national headlines, despite his dismal 39% success rate over the last 150 years. Although we haven’t turned to rotund rodents, we spend a lot of time exploring ways to predict energy industry trends. A far more reliable way to gain early insights into E&P spending and production patterns is by analyzing the year-end results and forecasts issued by the major oilfield services firms, which release their year-end reports well before E&Ps typically do. In today’s RBN blog, we review the data and insights from the reports and conference calls of the major firms that are in constant communication with the major oil and gas producers.

A long, long time ago — or, more precisely, in the spring of 2014, when WTI was selling for more than $110/bbl — a handful of exploration and production companies were convinced they were onto something big in southwestern Mississippi and east-central Louisiana. There, they believed, the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) was poised to become the next Bakken, the U.S.’s premier shale play at the time, but even better for producers seeking more robust crude prices because of TMS’s very low gas-to-oil ratio — an oil cut north of 92%! –– and proximity to Gulf Coast refineries. While there had been a host of failed efforts by producers to wring out large volumes of premium-priced Louisiana Light Sweet (LLS) oil from the marine shale’s sedimentary silts and clays, the E&Ps felt in their bones that they were finally “cracking the code.” Then, at just the wrong time, came an oil price crash that set the whole industry back on its heels and activity in the TMS quickly slowed to a crawl. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, an even smaller cadre of Tuscaloosa Marine Shale true believers is now banking on a production revival in the core of the play.

Let’s face it — for producers, the last couple of years have stung, with low-slung energy prices allowing little-to-no returns on drilling investments in most parts of the major shale basins. A side effect of the low price environment in the past two years has been the shrinking geographic footprint of the Shale Revolution. About 50% of all onshore rigs in the Lower 48 currently are clustered in the top 20 counties for drilling activity. In effect, this also means a lot of the new production growth will come primarily from these same 20 counties, with the potential for all sorts of implications for infrastructure and regional price relationships. In today’s blog, we take a closer look at rig counts by county to see how much the geographic focus of the Shale Revolution has narrowed.