The oil and gas industry has always been cyclical. Always has been and no doubt always will be. $20 per barrel oil is not new. Just during my career, there have been three substantial downturns in oil prices prior to the one we are experiencing today. These happened in approximately…
A well operated by Chesapeake Energy Corporation experienced a fiery blowout on Thursday, January 30, 2020. The well, the Daniel H 1 H, is located in Burleson County, Texas near Deanville. The well is in an area where Chesapeake is drilling long lateral well bores to develop Eagle Ford shale…
The United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently issued a report that in September 2019 the United States exported more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported. This is the first month in the history of recorded data (since 1949) that exports have exceeded imports. Specifically, 8.76 million barrels…
As production in Texas’ Permian Basin increases, so does the industry’s need for pipelines to transport production to treatment facilities and markets. Kinder Morgan, EagleClaw Midstream Ventures and Apache Corporation recently announced they have signed a letter of intent to build yet another oil and gas pipeline, to be called…
Economists at IHS Markit recently issued a report (summarized here) that predicts that oil production in the Permian Basin will almost double by 2023, increasing by 3 million barrels per day (mbd) to 5.4 mbd. That level of growth will account for more than 60% of net global oil production.…
As readers may recall, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a draft report in 2015 that concluded that there was no evidence that hydraulic fracturing (“fracing”) led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Environmental groups went ballistic over this conclusion. Bowing to public pressure,…
The U.S. Geological Survey released an updated report (that you can read here) regarding the alleged link between induced earthquakes, defined as earthquakes triggered by commercial activities, disposal wells or and hydraulic fracing. A Preliminary Forecast Model For Induced Quakes USGS scientists studied 17 geographical areas spanning eight states, where…
Graph courtesy of EOG Resources EOG Resources has been experimenting with enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques that may be good news for Texas mineral and royalty owners. Specifically, EOG has been using injections of natural gas to increase oil production on approximately 15 wells. They report that the new technique…
A company known as Biodentify, based in the Netherlands, announced that it can help predict oil and gas deposits based on DNA in the soil just a foot beneath the surface! Specifically, the company claims that by analyzing the microbiological DNA of shallow soil samples, it can predict “sweet spots”…
The Deep Carbon Observatory at the Carnegie Institution for Science is using “Big Data” to locate deposits of minerals, using techniques similar to those used by Amazon to recommend books based on a buyer’s previous book orders, or by Netflix to recommend new movies to a subscriber based on past…