Photograph Of the Week

Drilling frac plugs.

In the feeding frenzy to create more cash flow to service debt and drill more wells, completion rigs now work around the clock. When rigs are unavailable operators are using very expensive rig-assist snubbing units, even stand-alone snubbing units, to jack production tubing in and out of the hole and get the well on line as fast as possible. Cash is king.

13,000 hands have been sent to the house in the last year, thru the end of August, so says the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since then a bunch more drilling rigs have gone to the barn.

Four years on and two years off is not much of a "hitch" if you are working in America's shale oil patch and can only stand by and watch as your "clients" borrow more money, get deeper in debt, put more product on the market, drive the price down, and jeopardize your long term career chances when they have to dial it back, or go broke. So much unemployment will now come as a horrific shock to hands, and their families, who were told that their jobs were secure, that the shale oil phenomena in our nation was going to last for the next 25 years. Homes and big pickups, boats, collage educations, IRA's all that will go back to lenders and be put on hold; it's a mess. And all completely avoidable.

“Smart people do stupid things. Stupid people don't learn from them.” ― Frank Sonnenberg, Soul Food: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life