Boomtown
Last week, my day job took me to the Permian Basin. A colleague and I arrived late at night at our hotel in Fort Stockton, Texas. The hotel parking lot was full. The vehicles in the parking lot represented every type of oilfield-related business imaginable.
At the front desk, I was told that the hotel had overbooked us. So, we had to search for new accommodations at 11 p.m., but every hotel parking lot in town was full.
After an hour of searching, we finally located a pair of the last rooms in town. The carpet in my room smelled like crude oil, but I was happy to have a bed for the night.
That’s the way it goes in the Permian these days. In fact, I heard someone say that if you can’t make money in the Permian right now, you aren’t trying.
A Century of Production
After the oil price crash that began in mid-2014, crude oil production growth in the U.S. stalled. In 2016, annual production in the Bakken and Eagle Ford formations fell by 10-20 percent, but production in the Permian Basin continued to grow.
Amazingly, the Permian is approaching a century of oil production. At present, production has reached a record 2.8 million barrels per day (BPD), making it the world’s second-most-prolific field, behind the legendary Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. Read more…