Hess Midstream expects its oil volumes to plateau while natural gas volumes increase into at least 2027, a function of Chevron reducing its Bakken rig count from four to three in Q4 2025 and higher gas-to-oil (GOR) ratios in the producing wells, according to the company’s quarterly earnings call on November 3.
Permian production may have plateaued over the past few months — the shale play’s crude oil output has bounced between 6 MMb/d and 6.3 MMb/d for almost a year now, and natural gas production has hovered around 18 Bcf/d for about as long. But producer-backed plans to continue adding gas processing capacity in the Permian’s Delaware and Midland basins strongly suggest that E&Ps in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico see a lot more production growth “up around the bend.” As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, midstream companies haven’t tapped the brakes on their plans for new gas processing capacity in the Permian — in fact, they’ve been keeping the pedal to the metal.
For the past decade, producers in the Permian Basin have been the driving force in domestic production growth, but lately there has been a hard-to-miss slowdown in incremental production rates for crude, gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs). While Permian producers are primarily motivated by crude oil economics, those volumes also come with a lot of associated natural gas and NGLs. These commodities are therefore fundamentally interlinked. So if there’s a hangup with one, the effects will be felt across the upstream and then cascade downstream. There is a lot of money riding on these markets and the impacts of an extended slowdown in the Permian could be monumental, not just in the energy industry but also in the broader U.S. and global economies. In today’s RBN blog, we will examine what’s to blame for plateauing production in the U.S.’s most prolific basin and gauge what its big-picture implications might be.
Prior to COVID, crude oil and natural gas production in the U.S. had been on a tear, surging in tandem in the years following the 2014-15 price meltdown. But then the pandemic decimated domestic demand, crushing prices. Predictably, producers cut back production, particularly in crude-focused basins, and it was widely expected that associated gas from those regions would suffer in proportion. But that didn’t happen. Gas volumes have dropped somewhat, but not nearly to the extent that crude did. Said another way, the ratio of gas production to oil production has risen — and that’s been true at both the total U.S. level and in the primary unconventional basins for oil production. In today’s blog, we will look at the factors driving the trend of higher gas-to-oil ratios.
