This a pretty colored model of a 3-D seismic model one would see if sitting at a 3-D work station in say, downtown Houston processing seismic data on enormous, very fast computers . Or wherever. It is actually of a drilling prospect off the coast of South Africa.

The blue at the bottom of the image is salt related, a piercement dome that has puked up out of the basement for whatever reason. When the pinnacle was growing upward it was pushing clastic sandstones deposited on the sea floor prior to, or in conjunction with the salt event. Some of these sandstones pinched off against the salt wall and provide possible traps for hydrocarbons, some of the later sandstone deposits actually puckered up over the top of the salt anomaly and formed other possible traps for hydrocarbons, see in red.

Over geological time hydrocarbons were cooked in resource beds and…

This is a significant onshore blowout that occurred in 1996 in Italy. It ruined a lot of olive trees. Italians, being Italians, were very upset about the entire thing and did the only thing they knew to do, had the local police arrest the failed BOP preventer and take it to jail. Not kidding.

Read about it on OSC's Home Page.

Some of us saw this coming 1Q2025; well productivity was falling, in spite of longer laterals being drilled in both sub-basins, the Midland and the Delaware. Those longer laterals had higher IPs and were holding up pretty well for six, eight months before the decline kicked in. Longer laterals decline faster (82% the first 30 months) and have lower EURs. The last of the DUC's were getting drilled; it was impressive but not going to last. There are 57,000 HZ wells drilled in the Permian, many on spacing as close together as 500 feet; the room for three-and four-mile laterals is very limited. Go to a GIS map, use the scales and you can see that, bigger than daylight.

We said here on oilystuff.com that 4Q25 was going to start showing Permian decline. The time it takes from rig count publications and spudding a well to the first reported productio…

These sort of top-down resource estimates based on areal extent in square miles and acre feet of reservoir generally only have a P50, or a 50% probability, of actually coming to fruition. Remember technically recoverable means theoretically recoverable...the estimated resources have not even been discovered yet.

50% of 1.6 G BO, total recoverable resources from the Barnett/Woodford across the entire Permian Basin, would only equal 6 months of current exports of tight oil to foreign countries, from the same Basin. Six months!

50% of 28.3 TCF of natural gas, total recoverable resources from the Barnett/Woodford across the entire Permian Basin, would only equal 5 months of natural gas consumption in the United States (EIA). Five months!

If the truth be known the entire Permian Basin is likely flaring a BCF of associated gas from tight oil wells each day given the current WaHa Gas Hub postings .