The state’s new task force on petroleum theft conducted its first meeting last week in Austin.  Jim Wright, chair of the Railroad Commission of Texas, presided over the meeting Oct. 29 of the new group created in the recent 89th session of the Texas legislature.  Wright told task force members, “Your work in the coming year and wealth of knowledge will play a pivotal role in protecting our precious Texas natural resources.”  The group will study and make recommendations to help combat petroleum theft in Texas.

Discussion topics at last week’s meeting included strengthening collaboration between law enforcement and private operators, examining the impact of petroleum theft on state sales tax revenues, law enforcement training, and determining how to identify and align existing theft data gathered by law enforcement and regulatory agencies.

Forty percent of oil and gas operators told the commission that their operations have been impacted by theft in the past year.

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Permian Basin reported an additional active drilling rig for the second time in three weeks in Baker Hughes’ weekly count as of Oct. 31.  Permian now has 251 rigs (up 1 in the past week but down 52 or 17.2 percent from 303 a year ago).

Also as of Oct. 31, there were 235 rigs in Texas (down 1 in the past week and down 46 or 16.4 percent from 281 in the past year), 103 in New Mexico (up 1 in the past week, up 3 in the past year) and 546 in U.S. (down 4 in past week, down 39 or 6.7 percent from 585 in past year).

Eagle Ford in south Texas reported 43 active rigs for the second straight week, and Haynesville in east Texas and Louisiana is third among regions with 40 (down 1 in past week) ahead of Williston with 30 (unchanged) and Marcellus with 23 (unchanged).  Third among states was Oklahoma with 42 (unchanged) followed by Louisiana with 41 (up 1) and North Dakota with 29 (up 1).

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Spring, Texas-based ExxonMobil said Friday its third quarter net production of 4.769 million boed included record output from Permian Basin and Guyana.  In the Permian, ExxonMobil set a production record of nearly 1.7 million boed while continuing to expand the use of proprietary technologies such as its lightweight proppant that improves well recovery by up to 20 percent.

In Friday’s announcement of third quarter earnings, the company said it acquired more than 80,000 net acres in Permian Basin from Sinochem Petroleum to enhance future growth.  Darren Woods, chairman and CEO, said, “The transaction provides opportunities to further deploy the company’s innovative technology leading to greater returns… We’ve now started 8 of our 10 key 2025 projects with the remaining two on track.  No one else in our industry is executing at this scale with this level of innovation or delivering this kind of value.”

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SM Energy and Civitas Resources have agreed to merge and create a top 10 independent oil and gas company that will produce more than 500,000 boed from Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, DJ Basin in Colorado and two other basins.  The combined company’s enterprise value of about $12.8 billion includes each company’s net debt.  Monday’s announcement of the all-stock transaction said the company will continue to trade as SM Energy.

The combined company’s production in 2Q would have been 526,000 boed – nearly half from Permian Basin.  Completing the company’s output are assets in DJ (28 percent), south Texas (15 percent) and Uinta (9 percent) basins.  The combined company will have a portfolio of about 823,000 net acres “across the highest-return U.S. shale basins.”

Herb Vogel, CEO of SM Energy, said, “Congratulations to the Civitas team on building a leading sustainable energy company in the Permian and DJ basins since its inception in 2021.”  Ben Kell of investment manager Kimmeridge added, “This transformative transaction will immediately create a leading independent E&P company with a strong asset position across the premium oil-oriented basins in the U.S.”  Vogel will serve as CEO of the combined company before those duties transition to Beth McDonald, president and COO of SM Energy.  Oil & Gas Journal said the merger “had been rumored for several weeks.”

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“There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone.”    —August Wilson , American playwright, 1945-2005

The hunting camp was empty and he could see the November dawn through the window approaching over the trees. The other men had left in the dark by flashlight. They were waiting quietly now for the hunt to begin near granite ridges, green swamps, and game trails.

He had shown most of them how to find these places, where to stand, which way to look, and when to shoot. Then he set the dogs and ran deer to them and many others before their time.

Now he was too old to go to the woods and hunt. His legs got weak first. Then his eyes went. He tried to keep hunting but felt tired all the time. That’s when he knew something was eating away at him. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him that.

So he stayed behind at camp. It was his job to keep the fire going and clean up and cook lunch before the men returned from hunting.

He emptied the warm bacon grease from the cast iron fry pan into a jar. Then he lifted the metal coffee pot with his name scratched on the side to see if there was one more cup left. He sat down at the big wooden table in the middle of the room and stared at the crumbs and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts while he drank his coffee.

He thought about how his name would be scratched on the back page of a newspaper one day and then on a piece of stone. He didn’t care about that. He just hoped someone remembered him when they looked at the scratches on the coffee pot.

He knew it was a long time to wait for the hunt to come around each year. In the past, he had begun to miss it only weeks after it ended. So he learned to use his memories to help time pass until November came again.

Eventually he could return to the woods whenever he wanted. It didn’t matter where he was or what he was doing. He only had to release his imagination to be there. It was easy because he had paid attention to all the details and rituals in the woods and at the camp. He always thought he could go back to the woods each November and look and listen again to keep the memories alive and make new ones. Now he had to work hard to rely on the same old memories.

He knew that visitors and hunters looking for lost dogs would be dropping by soon. He used to like talking to them. But now he hoped they wouldn’t come. They would see him alone in the camp and ask him why he wasn’t hunting.

He also knew he could never sell his guns. But he wasn’t ready to give them away either. He had watched that happen before and it upset him and everyone else at camp that night. He could still hear the quiver in the voice of a man he once hunted with when he handed his grandson his knife and said, “This is yours now.” As the boy cried, his older brother refused their grandfather’s rifle and ran outside.

He looked around at the empty gun racks and unmade beds and bloodstained boots placed near the woodstove to dry. There were deer antlers mounted on the walls and plenty of pictures framed and taped and pinned there. He stood in front of a Polaroid photo of himself as a young man in an orange coat kneeling in the woods behind a deer holding up its head by the antlers.

He stepped forward and looked closely at the face in the photo. He was tired that day, too, but it felt good then. His smile was as big as his shoulders. He sat back down at the table and thought about how that was the face he still saw sometimes when he looked in the mirror.

Then he heard the fly.

It was at the window by the stove. Numerous other flies were piled dead in heaps along the window sill. That one fly kept buzzing as it flew up from the pile and into the closed window before falling down over and over. Just one wing seemed to be working.

“You won’t last long but you’re not going out with a whimper,” he said out loud. He looked at the fly swatter hanging by a nail on the cupboard, but decided it wouldn’t be right to use it. He admired the fly. It was a fighter. Like him.

Early that morning, when the hunters had left, he’d gone outside to watch. As they walked over the first ridge, someone had looked back and returned his wave. Now he was looking out the window, waiting for their return.

He saw them coming back over the same ridge. Two men were dragging a deer. He knew the ritual – the other hunters would be walking in front if the deer was a doe. But they were walking behind the men dragging the deer admiring it stretched out and moving along the ground.

The old hunter took out his grandfather’s knife and stepped out into the sunlight.

He was going to help the boys skin that buck and be part of the final ritual of the hunt.

He went to bed early that night and as his head hit the pillow, he closed his eyes one last time and he returned to his favourite part of the hunt – waiting alone in the dark at his watch when the approach of dawn can seem like an eternity, and feel like time is standing still—holding its breath, as night silently withdraws into the shadows, giving way to the break and light of day. In that moment and in his mind, the old hunter heard a dog howl in ecstasy, signaling to the men and deer that the hunt had begun again.

He followed the voice of the hounds in his mind’s eye as they pursued the deer around cedar swamps, over granite ridges, and into the tall pines near the beaver dam he had been watching.

It seemed like only a few minutes had passed, though it could have been an hour or more. He existed now only in the moment. He knew a deer was near, and soon he heard the unmistakable faint snap of a twig—and then another.

When the autumn woods went quiet again, he looked over his right shoulder and saw the deer, its white chest rising and falling, drawing breath to recover from the chase that was about to end and to prepare for the drama that was about to begin.

The old man thought that the buck seemed immersed in the green-grey gloom of the tangled woods. At first glance, it didn’t look like a deer but the faded apparition of one. As he raised his gun, the buck suddenly charged the old man, gathering speed and power with each leap and bound.

Later at camp, the old man told everyone how its rack tilted and swayed like the outstretched wings of some giant bird in flight. He said, “I could see his powerful heart and great spirit.”

He remembered his own heart pounding, too, and his blood racing and the hair on his neck standing and his sweat from his brow running down his cheek. But he could not recall his finger squeezing the trigger or the sound of the gun being fired or the recoil and jolt of the butt against his shoulder.

“They must have heard me shoot,” he thought to himself as he told his story at camp. But no one said they did. Instead someone said, “We all miss. It’s part of hunting.”

Then the others told their stories about how they, too, had missed the unkillable buck they called The Ghost that crossed the beaver dam that he had been watching that morning. He had heard the stories many times but listened anyway, because somehow it always seemed like he was hearing them for the first time. He liked to watch the men telling their stories and see their faces become brighter and younger as their voices sounded more excited.

He remembered that he went to bed early that night too and fell into a deep sleep without dreams or nightmares, and how breakfast was prepared and eaten quickly with little talk so the hunters could get back to the quiet woods before daylight in the swamp.

He stood at that same watch again, trance-like in the dark, marveling how it seemed he had never left. It was his favorite place in those sacred woods. He wanted his ashes to remain there. He called this place the “Last Watch.” He could not remember the last time he had seen another hunter so deep in the woods.

And then he heard the dog howl—or was it the wolf inside it somewhere far away in the timeless woods of the Canadian Shield that have not changed since time began. He thought about day and night and the time between and how it comes and goes in shadows and light and how it reminded him of life and death.

Later that morning, the old man heard the unforgettable sound of a twig snapping, and then another, as he turned his head towards eternity.

LW Oakley is a retired accountant living in Kingston, Ontario, and the author of Inside The Wild.

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C3 Oilfield Services has pioneered what it calls “new wave” huff-and-puff operations. Here they pump propane into an underperforming well to stimulate better performance.

The shale revolution 20+ years ago opened a new era of production for the United States and the Permian Basin in particular—while still leaving the vast majority of the oil in the ground. Over the years, engineers have worked on opening up more oil from these tight shales, both in initial production and in reentries through enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

Here we will look at two aspects of well stimulation. C3 Oilfield Services is changing the game in what’s been called “huff and puff” single well treatments, which are necessary in tight shales. And GEODynamics® uses a data analytics model, called StageCoach to predict and direct proppant flow during the initial frac process.

C3 Oilfield Services has been at work changing the huff and puff game in recent years. In their original process, known as Single Shot, they already were replacing water and CO₂ with profitably recoverable treatments like “propane, butane, pentane, all the way up to C12-C13 any combination thereof,” said Daniel Purvis, C3’s VP of business development.

To those elements they add their “proprietary chemistry cocktail surfactant to foam” to treat underperforming wells. Often those treatments are used to dissolve paraffin in the wellbore or in the tubing, or to unload water or other liquids, and the company has seen success in the Permian and in South Texas. This results in greatly improving the well’s decline curve.

Horizontal is the Future

So far, they’ve only done vertical wells, but with the future being in horizontals, they’ve developed new fit-for-purpose equipment for the longer, higher production wells.

Daniel Purvis

What’s made this possible is reformulating their mix to require much less pumping, shorter onsite times, and, therefore, greatly reduced down time and costs. Tadd Wallace, C3 CEO, explained that, in many vertical wells, they’re using 100-200 barrels of some type of NGLs pumped in 1-2 hours to greatly reduce the costs.

“Essentially,” said Wallace, “the new-wave huff and puff is what we’ve built here.” That’s the old term for EOR in tight shales that is applied one well at a time. Theirs is the same in that regard, but Wallace and Purvis say their process is faster, more cost-effective, and more productive. In many wells, “For just the cost of renting a compressor for a traditional huff and puff they can pay us to do the whole job,” Wallace said.

Recently they’ve been using this cocktail blend for remediation, both in paraffinic wells and in condensate wells suffering from liquid loading, said Purvis. In the latter they’re using propane’s solubility and miscibility properties as they interact with downhole liquids and gas in wells with condensate loads near the wellbore.

The need becomes clear when a well’s previously smooth decline curve hits a snag and drops dramatically. “And that tells us we’ve got probably some condensate block there. We’ll go in, we’ll pump a very small job, a couple of hundred barrels. And because of the miscibility properties of propane with that condensate, it reduces the surface tension and, introducing viscosity, flows it out, clears it up, and gets that well back to its original decline curve.” Sometimes it does even better than before.

Going the Distance

The future is in horizontals and long laterals, and they’re moving that direction, starting in the Bakken, but with eyes on the Permian Basin as well. Adapting their historic treatment to horizontals has involved investing in more-powerful equipment. Wallace and Purvis feel they can get the same results as with verticals.

Wallace said, “The capital problem with the huff and puff was all the large equipment and large CapEx needed to put out to achieve it. Well, for just the [cost] of renting the compressor to do a huff and puff they can pay us to treat the whole job.” Many operators tried older methods and had some success, but the cost of the operation meant it was still a net loss.

The problem with the “huff-and-puff” operations was the high capex needed for long-term facilities and large compressors and rentals that are needed, not including the value of the injected fluid choice. With C3 OFS services, that cost is cut down to a low capex that is a small fraction of the capex needed for the known “huff-and-puff” operations with no long-term infrastructure.”

This pallet of perforating guns, called a gun carrier, displays the trademark green of GeoDynamics. As a leader in oilfield explosives, GeoDynamics now takes their science a step further, as they pioneer ways to incorporate powdered tracers into their charges, to help measure effectiveness downhole. Says Eric Marshall: “We can catch that tracer coming back in production and actually see on a cluster-to-cluster level how that stage is producing,”

Specifically, “We’re able to do what, just three years ago, would have cost $3-4 million for [less than] half—for $1,000,000 now. We’ve got the process smaller, more efficient, less capital intensive, and less mechanically intensive, i.e., not nearly the amount of equipment on surface personnel and whatnot.”

Another cost benefit is that the treatments they pump down are commodities that can be sold when they return to the surface. That includes propane, butane, produced condensates, drip gas, and more.

They see time savings as well. Wallace said an average vertical job shuts in a well for 12-48 hours. For horizontals, working 24-hour days, they expect to take 3-10 days. With this method the benefit does outweigh the cost—and it’s proven in verticals and, it is hoped, will also be true in horizontals.

GEODynamics Sees Below the Surface

Eric Marshall

Because most oil industry processes are deep below the surface, it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what is happening down there. Recent technological gains have given operators and service companies greater insight, letting them improve procedures that can grow production. GEODynamics’ StateCoach data analytics modeling solution is among those.

At first glance, in the completions process, creating holes for the proppant to enter the formation seems simple, said Eric Marshall, senior engineering technical advisor for GEODynamics. “Perforations [teams], as a whole, ask how big you want the hole, how many holes do you want and how many holes per foot do you want?”

Easy? No. But wait, there’s more.

Longer laterals and more clusters complicate matters. “But when we’re doing eight, ten, or twelve clusters per stage we have to focus on diversion and making sure the diversion of the fluid is as even as possible across those stages,” he added.

Ensuring frac hole sizes are equal across clusters is vital in distributing frac fluid evenly. Even distribution maximizes production—the actual goal—by opening as much of the formation as possible to oil flow. In the Permian, stress contrasts between formations make that a challenge, Marshall said.

Minimizing or equalizing the erosion of holes is also important in equalizing flow. Holes in the first perforations, towards the heel, see the full frac rate go by, exposing them to more erosion than the last ones, in the toe.

Seeing is Understanding

StageCoach’s ability to predict the frac fluid flow came about through a series of surface tests in which they pumped a frac fluid and measured the rate and pressure at each fracture, then collected and measured the sand and fluid passing through each one.

Then, “We took that data and created a model that allows us to get a better idea of what’s going to happen downhole. Then we can take an operator’s pump schedule and their proposed perforating strategy and [we can] model what that diversion is going to look like,” Marshall explained.

This helps with designing pump velocity, fluid content, sand mesh, and other factors. “The ultimate goal is to access as much reservoir as possible, which involves lateral length, effective frac jobs, perforation, and density,” he said. “How do we know that’s being effective? That was one of the questions we set out to answer [with StageCoach],” he said.

Getting exact improvement percentages for this type of procedure is impossible because no two wells are alike, but Marshall says they estimate StageCoach has improved production by as much as five to 10 percent in some cases since being released in 2022.

Here is a different angle on the pump unit from C3 Oilfield Services that can be seen at the beginning of the article.

Tracing the Flow

Marshall and the StageCoach team decided that tracking what was actually happening would help even more. So, they began using an inert, powdered tracer that is unaffected by the conditions created during the perforating process with their charges.

“When we perforate, that tracer gets embedded in the near well perf tunnel. We can then catch that tracer coming back in production and actually see on a cluster-to-cluster level how that stage is producing,” he explained.

Each perf charge can be manufactured to have a separate tracer. That way, he said, “We can track that from manufacturing to the field. Then it’s a matter of making sure that you’ve got your inventory and you know which tracer in each gun is being shot so we can track each one individually.  For example, cluster one being the toe side has tracer A, cluster two has tracer B, and so on.”

The Future and Capital Efficiency

In Shale 4.0, referenced elsewhere in this edition, efficiency is key, said Marshall, and in the last couple of years “things have been more commoditized. Driving down costs is a big topic these days, which could change perforating technologies. It wouldn’t surprise me if we started seeing fewer, larger holes. It’s much less expensive to deploy a larger perforating charge than to deploy more of the smaller charges that create smaller holes.”

Whatever happens, Marshall sees improvements continuing. His mantra has served him well: “I’m not scared to admit I didn’t know something, I just know more than I did a few years ago. If you’re not looking for ways to change and improve, you’re going to be behind for sure.”

Paul Wiseman

A long-time contributor to PB Oil and Gas Magazine, PAUL WISEMAN is an energy industry freelance writer. His email address is [email protected].

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NRG Energy will receive a $562 million low-interest loan through a state fund that supports construction of new natural gas power plants. It’s the third and largest loan announced under the Texas Energy Fund.  The 20-year loan (for 60 percent of project cost) will allow NRG to move forward with construction of a 721-megawatt unit at its Cedar Bayou generating station in Chambers County near Baytown.  It is expected to begin generating power by summer 2028.

The loan announced Sept. 26 by Gov. Greg Abbott more than doubles the amount of money distributed – and the power generation expected to be created – since state lawmakers launched the Texas Energy Fund in 2023 to strengthen the state’s strained power grid.  PUC said there now are 14 applications in process for loans from the fund.

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Oil and natural gas tax contributions also remained high in August, according to Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. According to data from the Texas comptroller’s office, in August Texas energy producers paid $445 million in oil production taxes, a six-month high. Producers also paid $194 million to the state in August in natural gas production taxes, up 143 percent from August 2024.

Revenue that is provided from oil and gas production taxes offers funding to support public services and state programs, including Texas’ public schools and universities, roads, first responders and other services.

TIPRO reported additional data confirming record high crude oil and natural gas production this summer. U.S. crude oil production in June jumped 133,000 barrels per day to 13.58 million b/d, according to data from U.S. Energy Information Administration. This compares with production a year ago of 13.25 million b/d.

EIA’s data also showed crude production in top-producing state Texas increased 11,000 bpd in June to 5.72 million bpd. Gross natural gas production in the U.S. lower 48 states hit a record 120.7 billion cubic feet per day in June, up from 120.2 Bcfd in May. In Texas, monthly natural gas output in June rose by 0.7 percent to 36.8 Bcfd.

Ed Longanecker, president of TIPRO, said Sept. 22, “The Texas oil and natural gas industry remains vital for job creation, innovation and energy security, with 2025 employment trends driven by a variety of dynamic factors.  Federal policies, including faster permitting and expanded LNG export approvals, along with transformative investment in AI-driven data centers, will support increased export activity, creating high paying jobs in midstream, gas-fired generation and export infrastructure.”

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Citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association highlighted new employment figures that show an increase in upstream employment in Texas in August. According to TIPRO’s analysis, direct Texas upstream employment for August totaled 205,100, an increase of 200 industry positions from July. This represented a decrease of 200 jobs in oil and gas extraction and the addition of 400 jobs in the services sector.

TIPRO’s new workforce data indicated strong job postings for the Texas oil and natural gas industry. According to the association, there were 10,154 unique jobs postings for the Texas oil and natural gas industry in August compared to 8,853 postings in July (and 3,806 new postings compared to 3,840 the previous month).

Among the 19 industry sectors TIPRO uses to define Texas’ oil and natural gas industry, support activities for oil and gas operations led in rankings for unique job listings in August with 2,212 postings followed by gasoline stations with convenience stores (1,896), petroleum refineries (1,166) and pipeline transportation of natural gas (867).

TIPRO said Sept. 22 leading cities by total unique oil and natural gas job postings in August were Houston (2,497), Midland (682), Dallas (410) and Odessa (357).

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U.S. crude production hit a record high of 13.64 million barrels per day in July, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration.  Major producing states Texas and New Mexico contributed significantly to the new standard.  The U.S. mark was 109,000 barrels above the previous record in June.

Production in Texas rose to 5.8 million barrels per day – the highest since October 2024 – and New Mexico produced a record 2.28 million barrels per day.

EIA also said Tuesday that gross natural gas production in July was a record 121.62 billion cubic feet per day – above the previous high of 120.57 Bcfd in June.  Monthly output in Texas grew 1.4 percent to an all-time high of 37.35 Bcfd.

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