Lease operating expenses

With a dwindling market for their crude, many U.S. producers are confronting an unavoidable choice: shutting in existing production. Just go out and flip a switch and turn a valve, right? Wrong. Like everything else in the COVID era, shutting in production is complicated. It is the alternative of last resort for producers, whose primary directive is the economic extraction of oil and gas. But with demand for their products crushed, production from some wells no longer makes economic sense. Unfortunately, the process of shutting in wells is charged with contractual, economic and operational issues that the industry is scrambling to deal with. The situation is fraught with uncertainty, and many producers’ futures depend on how decisively they manage the shut-in process. Today, we discuss the urgent need to reduce oil production and the judgments producers will be making as they take wells offline.

The largest single expense associated with operating wells in a number of U.S. shale plays — including the Permian — is the cost of dealing with the large volume of produced water that emerges from wells along with crude oil, natural gas and NGLs. In many cases, produced-water disposal costs account for more than half of total well-operating costs, and every dime or dollar per barrel that an exploration and production company (E&P) needs to spend on produced water increases its break-even cost and saps its bottom line. To rein in trucking and other produced water-related expenses, more E&Ps and midstream companies are (1) developing produced-water treatment plants that allow the water to be reused in hydraulic fracturing and (2) building centralized systems that efficiently transport untreated produced water from multiple wells to treatment plants or to regional disposal wells. Today we continue our surfing-themed series on the effect of sand and water costs on producer economics with a look at how the old ways of dealing with produced water are being replaced by the new.

Despite OPEC’s production cuts, crude oil prices are still hovering just below $50/bbl, and there are certainly no guarantees that they won’t fall back to $40 or lower (at least for a while). So the survival of many exploration and production companies continues to depend on razor-thin margins, meaning that E&Ps need to trim their capital and operating costs to the bone. Lease operating expenses—the costs incurred by an operator to keep production flowing after the initial cost of drilling and completion—are a go-to cost component in assessing the financial health of an E&P. But there’s a lot more to LOEs than meets the eye, and understanding them in detail is as important now as ever. Today we continue our series on the little-explored but important topic of lease operating expenses.

While oil prices have risen in recent months, they are a far cry from the $100/bbl prices of two and half years ago, and there is certainly no guarantee they won’t fall back below $50. In other words, the survival of exploration and production companies continues to depend on razor-thin margins, and E&Ps must continue to pay very close attention to their capital and operating costs. Lease operating expenses—the costs incurred by an operator to keep production flowing after the initial cost of drilling and completing a well have been incurred—are a go-to cost component in assessing the financial health of E&Ps. But there’s a lot more to LOEs than meets the eye, and understanding them in detail is as important now as ever. Today we continue our series on a little-explored but important factor in assessing oil and gas production costs.

With today’s low crude oil and natural gas prices, the survival of exploration and production companies depends on razor-thin margins. Lease operating expenses––the costs incurred by an operator to keep production flowing after the initial cost of drilling and completing a well have been incurred––are a go-to variable in assessing the financial health of E&Ps. But it’s not enough for investors and analysts to pull LOE line items from Securities and Exchange Commission filings to find the lowest cost producers, plays, or basins. More than ever we need to understand—really, truly, deeply—what LOEs are, why they matter, how they change with commodity prices, production volumes, and other factors, and how we should use them when comparing players and plays. Today we begin a series on a little-explored but important factor in assessing oil and gas production costs.