โBut if you look at the Baker Hughes oil and gas rig count, it's basically been trending sideways. In fact, the last available data, it fell by three. And then if you go out even further, it's been going sideways and slightly down since basically 2023. So we haven't seen a big supply side push, and that's despite a lot of noise coming out from the administration about unleashing US energy.โ
Conventional reservoirs offer higher porosity than shale
โConventional reservoirs have much higher porosity and permeability. They're actually much better reservoirs from a geologic standpoint. And so for the most part, you'll hear it in the industry parlance, those were the easy reservoirs to find. If you go back to like the 1920s, 1930s, drilling a field like the Yates field, which is kind of one of the most prolific oil fields, you were basically drilling a thousand feet into the ground vertically, and they were getting 400 to 500 to 1500 barrel a day IPs.โ
โThe horizontal shale game has largely become the domain of very large companies. I mean, you've got to have scale to be able to operate in that space. We're largely a production company. So the way to kind of think about it is, we buy assets that we think are undercapitalized, underappreciated, try to squeeze a little bit more juice out of each producing well and try to get cost down.โ
โNow we're the largest oil and gas producer in the world. We produce more oil than any company in any country in the world. And so it's kind of gone unnoticed. And so I wanted to kind of get out and bring that up.โ
โA lot of just, as I said, a lot of the assets that we're targeting are just too small. You know, they're rounding errors on the balance sheets of these large shale companies who are buying tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of acres and drilling two to three miles under the ground. So it's just, we produce the same product. It's just a very different business.โ