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Post by pyromancer157 on Apr 23, 2024 20:41:09 GMT -5
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Post by bjspokanimal on Apr 24, 2024 12:23:22 GMT -5
Here is an excerpt from the halliburton post from Pyromancer above: Halliburton Co., the world’s biggest provider of fracking work, posted its best earnings for a first quarter in a dozen years despite a shrinking business in the shale patch.
The company that helps oil explorers around the globe drill and complete new wells reported quarterly earnings of $679 million, excluding certain items, it said Tuesday in a statement. International sales grew 12% while North America revenue fell 8% compared to a year earlier. Shares fell 1.2% at 9:38 a.m. in New York trading.It's very similar from this quote from the Schlumberger CEO last earlier this month: "We remain confident in our global revenue growth outlook for 2024, with softness in North America being offset by upside in the international markets. The dynamics of this cycle remain intact, with international and offshore growth taking place across all geographies"
The common thread, is that international and offshore are growing and U.S. shale is declining, in terms of revenue that these two giant oil service providers derive from those sectors. U.S. derived revenues in general are declining. If you look at the "U.S. crude oil domestic production" graphic in this link: www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/crude.php... you can also see that U.S. production has plateaued, and is generally declining a little bit since last November. That is also consistent with the HAL and SLB reports. In both the peak U.S. production in early 2020 and the recent peak this last winter, U.S. production has demonstrated a "ceiling" around 13.3 million barrels per day that it has not pierced in either of those run-ups. The upshot appears to be that U.S. shale is growing no more and the industry now appears to be drilling new wells mainly to replace declining production from the hundreds of thousands of short-life-pan existing shale wells. Shale is like that, the more they produce, the more frantically they have to drill new wells to sustain that production, given how fast they deplete. And since there are precious few tier-1 shale prospects left, "re-fracking" has become a new phenomenon there. |
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Post by Blitz on Apr 24, 2024 12:41:04 GMT -5
U.S. Frackers Seek Ways to Reverse Well Productivity Declines By Tsvetana Paraskova - Apr 24, 2024, 10:30 AM CDT oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Frackers-Seek-Ways-to-Reverse-Well-Productivity-Declines.htmlAs well productivity in the U.S. shale patch has declined in the past two years, producers are looking to deploy new technology to reverse these declines, but small companies often cannot afford the high upfront costs, industry executives and analysts have told Reuters. While shale production pushed U.S. crude oil output to record highs in recent months to above 13 million barrels per day (bpd), the rate of productivity declines has steepened since 2020 as the fracking of closely located wells has interfered with geology and pressure, resulting in more difficult extraction of the resources. Oil decline profiles have steepened across U.S. shale oil plays over the last decade, Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR) said in a report in August 2023. “We’ve observed that decline curves, meaning the rate at which production falls over time, are getting steeper as well density increases,” Dane Gregoris, report author and managing director at EIR, commented at the time. “Summed up, the industry’s treadmill is speeding up and this will make production growth more difficult than it was in the past.” But advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies have increased well productivity over the past year, helping U.S. producers extract more crude oil from new wells drilled while maintaining production from legacy wells, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said last month. One of these technologies, simultaneous fracking technology, or simul-frac, can achieve over double the gains in lateral footage, in less time, compared to zipper-frac operations, says Halliburton, the leader in the U.S. fracking services market. The simul-frac tech, however, needs a lot of wells drilled beforehand and then fracked simultaneously. This requires a lot of investment before oil can flow from the wells—and not all companies can afford that. “That's $100 million in the ground before you see any revenue,” Mike Oestmann, chief executive at small company Tall City Exploration told Reuters. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com |
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Post by bjspokanimal on Apr 25, 2024 12:28:35 GMT -5
There has been more drilling than fracking lately, which is probably the result of more
simul-fracking. There are also fewer DUCs lately as well, requiring a step up in drilling.
I remember, during the oil bust in 2020, and in 2021 as shale companies were trying to
recovery financially, that those companies prioritized their best, tier-1 prospects in order
to maximize margins during those tough times. To do that, they developed tier-1 wells in
closer proximity to one another rather than more widely spaced tier-2 wells. Re-fracking
also became more popular to extract more oil out of depleted wells at a lower cost than
drilling a new well.
All of this is resulting in tier-1 shale fields getting more and more depleted year by
year. Technology is helping tier-2 prospects produce a higher and higher percentage of
what a greenfield, tier-1 well traditionally produced, but it's a zero-sum game as time
goes on, which helps to account for the plateauing of U.S. oil production in the 13 to
13.4 million BPD range, which is about the same production the U.S. achieved at the
height of production back in early 2020 before covid's impact hit.
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