The report in the Dallas Morning News Wednesday morning that Pioneer Natural Resources has decided to divest all other assets in order to focus exclusively on the Permian Basin confirms what many have already known: the Permian truly is America’s “Super Basin,” or as others prefer to call it, Saudi Texas.
After all, it isn’t as if the assets Pioneer will divest are just your basic oilfield garbage: They include roughly 70,000 acres of prime acreage in the Eagle Ford Shale region, in which Pioneer was an early and very successful player. They also include some prolific natural gas acreage in deep South Texas and in the Raton Basin along the border between Colorado and New Mexico.
Pioneer is a company that has had a strong record of success wherever it has produced; thus, it’s decision to focus exclusively on the Permian is strong testimony to both the magnitude of the resource available in that region, and the prime economics offered by prolific oil and natural gas formations stacked one atop another throughout a vast region that is larger than the state of South Carolina. Read more…