Oily Stuff
Oily News, Analysis & Opinions
Oily Photographs, History, Videos & Cartoons
Oily Humor & Short Stories About a Very Long, Oily Life
Charts
Here is a recent Novi map of acreage positions in the Midland Basin and Central Platform for 15 of the largest tight oil producers in the Permian. Many of those tight oil producers, Pioneer, Chevron, Apache and Exxon for instance, have significant blocks of acreage surrounding shallow pays on the Platform and in the Midland Basin itself; many are in water flood, even C02 flood. All this acreage is important but gives us little insight into what the big boys have left to drill over HZ pays like the Wolfcamp and Sparberry in the Midland Basin. Neither of these formations exist on the Platform. The big boys in the Midland Basin HZ play are who will deliver the goods for America's long term energy security. They have the bucks, the acreage and the infrastructure to get rid of oceans of produced water and
markets for increasing associated gas production.
Notice, please, how centralized the Big Boy's acreage is in 4-6 counties in the Basin's core and how little acreage they have on flank counties, where the USGS assessed there to be tens of billions of barrels of technically recoverable resources left to be recovered. If it was so good out there in the boondocks, why haven't the big boys leased it?
EOG and Exxon had acreage out there in no-man's land and now their dumping it.
Make no mistake there are hundreds of small independents with small acreage positions out on the flanks, in the USGS assessment area, and they are drilling B and B- quality wells, but is that going to help America in the long run?
There's 20,000 some odd wells in the core counties of the Midland Basin owned by the Big Boys with the Big Bucks; wells are banging into each other, productivity (by any definition) is declining and whoa Nellie, are things getting gassy.
Are you absolutely sure its a good idea to believe everything you read on the internet about 25 more years of Permian Basin tight oil growth?There sure are a lot of people out there selling mad poop to keep the party going and make a buck.