I should have made THIS the chart of the week.

I'll be done with this stuff very soon and you won't have to deal with me anymore. Above are all HZ wells drilled in the Permian Basin since the get-go of the HZ revolution, on all benches. Here we can see that in spite of super long laterals, coke-proppant, surfactants and artificial intelligence... 2026 wells are going to suck really badly, even when TRRC data gets all in.

You can poo-poo this all you want but the Permian is poopin' out.

I'm tracking some benches in the Delaware that have degraded 23% or more since 2024, some big benches in the Bone Springs. Stop and think about that for a moment. Down hole I've shown you how the upper Wolfcamp looks. It ain't good. They've drilled them too close together, sucked all the life out of them for cash flow,…

It must be hard to sell gas from wells for $1.11 per MMbtu. I wouldn't do it, but I had the sort of reservoirs we could shut in and open them up in winter, peak demand/price months. And I wasn't $6 b in long term debt at an average interest rate of 5.35% nor did I have dividends to pay and most certainly did not have to produce valuable hydrocarbon resources to pay myself $16MM a year in compensation, like Toby Rice. Debt makes you do stupid things you would never otherwise do if you simply operated within net cash flow.

Regardless of where you look, if you are looking right and not afraid, well productivity is getting worse in the Permian. 2023 was a big year, if you recall, for the big spike in production related to falling rig count (we decided that was mostly DUCs getting completed and lumped in with productivity metrics), but 2024 and particularly 2025 have been downhill ever since. I am surprised nobody is analyzing this phenomenon more; then again, I'm not.

Here I am using Welldatabase data and have picked the most productive correlative interval in the entire Permian, both sub-basins, the Upper Wolfcamp (A & B benches), and the data set begins January 2010.

In 2025 wells took a big hit and 2026 is looking bleak at the halfway mark. Here we can see where HZ wells were drilled in 2025, what type of oil they produced, where 2025 ranks in the data…

Sometimes you just gotta draw a picture for people to grasp the significance of something.

In this visualization we see HZ tight oil production from the 3rd largest producing county in the entire Permian Basin, Midland, how fast it rose from the vertical Spraberry dust into its current HZ glory. Saudi America, Sheffield coined it.

We can see, at least I can, that each successive year of the HZ plays existence its rate of annualized decline has gotten steeper and steeper. We also see that its C+C volumes have kept growing and growing from now 9,900 HZ wells stacked in the county, in every bench that will produce, like cord wood behind the barn, many drilled as close as 330 feet apart. Parent child interference is rampant; degradation and pressure depletion are all in 4th gear.

Then we can see how fast the entire shebang would drop if no new…

...hanging in this grand old mesquite tree in South Texas. The only hint is, it's very old, like me...and the mesquite tree. Trying to cut a limb off this old girl and you would burn three new Stihl chain saw chains into slick wire.

If you are right, you get a chicken fried steak with cream gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, biscuits, with sweet tea, at a joint in the Flatonia area whose business is picking back up after customers found a large chicken snake in the hallway leading to the bathrooms. After a local Bohemian lady beat it with a broom it was removed and let loose out the back door, confused but not harmed. No worries on the snake, or the cafe. The cream gravy is to die for.

Conway, damn it, I got you this time. I think.

"In general, the practice of managing flowback to protect a fracture job in a horizontal well is not new. Gas producers working the Haynesville Shale, a relatively soft formation in Louisiana, learned several years ago that managing the release of flowback often meant the difference between a live well and a dead one.

Crafton, who is also an SPE distinguished lecturer and author of several SPE papers on flowback, coined the term “slowback” to describe how his clients in the Haynesville managed to overcome their early failures. While working for an operator there, he found that crews were being paid bonuses to get the flowing surface pressure of gas wells from 1,000 psi to 2,000 psi down to the line pressure of 300 psi within 36 hours.

“I started looking at the production histories and you could see these were awesome completions,” he said. “But when they would impose that…

This is the first chance I've had to see Enno Peter's new work.

As one might expect, its simple, easy to read, concise and fast. No filtering to dark thirty to see what you want. This I recall was the mindset from the beginning of shaleprofile.com a decade or more ago...let the data do the speaking... think for yourself. No artificial intelligence necessary. I like that because I don't like kids who've never owned working interest, paid an LOE or an AFE telling me I need machines to explain to me what stuff means.

Here we see a type curve for oil rate vs. cumulative oil production for 60,000-some-odd wells in the Permian, per year. 2010-2015 is cached, thank you very much. Projected decline I suspect is spot on.

We know that Permian HZ wells decline sort on a modified hyperbolic basis, then bubble point arrives and liquids dive for…

This from Novi. It says exactly what you would expect it to say. The Midland Basin has peaked, well productivity is falling on all relative metrics (over-drilling= well interference =degradation =pressure depletion), but not to worry because Tier 1 level locations are only 55% taken and there is lots of running room.

Economics are half-cycle = breakeven @ $50 WTI, even discounted 25%. Spacing used in this analysis must be <500 feet on every bench, D&C costs remain the same forever and produced water disposal is not a problem. Pressure depletion never gets worse, in spite of more wells in the cores, etc. etc. Everything is good. Naturally.

Let's get updated on the Barnett, because everybody is hanging their hard hats on that to save the world.

I included Andrews, Ector and Crane Counties in this mix. As I've suggested before these wells are deep, require multiple strings of pipe,…