Permian Basin · Texas & New Mexico

Permian Completions Weekly

Frac jobs disclosed to FracFocus · activity through September 7, 2026 · published September 8, 2026
Last week this newsletter made a prediction. It did not come true, and that is the lead. We reported that EOG had broken a 244-day filing blackout and said to expect its settled pace to jump this issue as the new jobs aged into the window. EOG filed nothing at all this week — zero new disclosures. Its 19 disclosures with 2026 job ends are the identical set we saw last week, its newest job end is still 2026-08-24 (now 15 days back, up from 8), and its settled pace is still 1.7/28 d. The blackout break was one batch, not a resumed cadence. Full detail in the card below. Second, and just as important to read correctly: this was a thin filing week. Against last week's extract, 65 new disclosures landed and 5 disappeared. That, and not a slowdown on the ground, is why the headline tile and the settled pace both fell. This issue's 28-day tile reads 109 jobs and the settled pace 308.0 per 28 days; recompute last issue's own 28-day window on this morning's filings and its published 112-job tile is already 150 jobs, while its 322.3 settled pace recomputes to 325.7 (+3.4). Read this week's 109 as a floor, not a count. And read the last columns of every chart with a grain of salt. The week ending September 7 shows 0 jobs on file against a settled pace nearer 77 a week — the newest job end anywhere in this extract is 2026-08-26, so the week has simply not been filed yet. The same zero appears on the drilling-versus-completions chart, where the September 4 point is 0 frac jobs against 268 rigs. That is filing lag, not a shutdown.
Frac jobs, last 28 days
109
Aug 11 – Sep 7, 2026 · filings still arriving
New Mexico / Texas split
35 / 74
32.1% of jobs in NM — against last issue's window recomputed at 34.7% (52 of 150), not the 40.2% it printed on the day
Settled pace
≈308 jobs/28d
jobs ended 42–126 days back ÷ 3 — the fully-reported baseline
Median water per job
506,721 bbl
median, n = 109 jobs reporting (the mean is 541,000)
Median proppant per job
23,335,956 lbs
median, n = 84 jobs reporting (the mean is lower, at 22,500,000)
Produced / recycled water
82.9%
volume-weighted share of disclosed base water — a genuine jump from last issue's window recomputed at 71.3% on this morning's filings (it printed 71.0% on the day) · by jobs it is 78.1% (57 of 73 reporting a source) · 73 of 109 jobs report source · record-level 73.1% (57 of 78 rows). The tile leads on the volume-weighted figure this issue; last issue's two readings happened to coincide at 71%, this issue's do not

The EOG call did not come true — here is what actually happened

FracFocus disclosures filed by EOG Resources with a 2026 job end, read against the New Mexico regulator's permit and DUC counts (OCD, queried Sep 8). A newsletter that prints a prediction has to print the outcome.

What we said last week. EOG had been dark for 244 days. It filed fifteen disclosures with 2026 job ends in one go, went from the darkest large filer in the basin to current in a single step, and we wrote that its settled pace of 1.7 per 28 days was a timing artifact that would "jump next issue" as those July and August jobs aged into the 42–126 day window.

What happened. Nothing. EOG filed zero new disclosures this week. Its 19 disclosures with 2026 job ends are the identical set we read last week — not one added, not one revised. Its newest job end is still 2026-08-24, which has aged from 8 days back to 15. Its settled pace is still 1.7/28 d, unchanged to the decimal. Its filed-last-28 count fell from 10 to 5, and that fall is pure arithmetic. It is worth being exact about which jobs moved: the 28-day window rolled forward off the Aug 4, 5 and 10 jobs, 5 of them. No July job was ever in that window — last issue's ran Aug 4 to Aug 31 and held only the ten August jobs. The Jul 16 batch is the one sitting in the settled window, and it is what produces the 1.7/28 d. The blackout break was one batch, not a resumed cadence, and last week's call was wrong to read it as the second thing. The jump is deferred, not cancelled, but it is slower than "next issue": Aug 4 enters the settled window at the Sep 15 anchor, Aug 5 and 10 at Sep 22, and Aug 20, 21, 23 and 24 not until the Oct 6 issue. EOG remains flagged current on the filing table at 15 days, because the flag measures the age of the newest filing and nothing else.

New Mexico says the opposite, and it says it louder than last week. EOG's unspudded permit bank fell 28 to 971 — a third consecutive fall and by far the biggest yet (1,012 → 1,009 → 999 → 971) — while its New Mexico DUC stack rose 37 to 852. It is converting permits into drilled wells faster than it is adding permits, and then not completing them. EOG alone is 32% of the basin's entire DUC build this week; EOG and Mewbourne together are 51%. Drilling, yes. Completing and filing, no. Every pace, fleet and spend figure in this issue still understates EOG.

Special: a decade of sand per foot — the basin found its number

Midland Basin, nine core counties · FracFocus proppant mass joined to RRC W-2 perforated intervals · 20,479 joined wells surviving the sanity filters, 2016 – Sep 2026 · median lb of sand per perforated foot by frac year · *2026 is preliminary (n = 313). This week the series genuinely moved, and it is worth saying so plainly after three issues of reporting that it did not. The Sep 5 RRC wellbore file took the joined-well count 20,437 → 20,479; 2026 fell 2,007 → 1,996 lb/ft on a sample that grew 287 → 313, and 2025 rose 2,038 → 2,040 on n 2,033 → 2,049. The other 9 years — 2016 through 2024 — reproduce to the pound. This is a real move on new joins, not a reprint and not a method change.
1,474
2016
1,795
2017
1,855
2018
1,852
2019
1,898
2020
1,998
2021
2,002
2022
2,021
2023
2,029
2024
2,040
2025
1,996
2026*

Everyone remembers the loading race. From 2016 to 2018 the median Midland Basin well went from 1,474 to 1,855 lb per perforated foot — a 26% jump in two years, the era when every investor deck had a "bigger fracs" slide. Then the race just… stopped. Since 2018 the median has crept from 1,855 to 2,040 lb/ft — about 10% in seven years, and the preliminary 2026 column sits at 1,996 lb/ft, statistically indistinguishable from 2025 and, if anything, a shade below it. Call it ~2,000 lb/ft: the design equilibrium the basin settled on once the cost-per-barrel math stopped rewarding more sand.

The movement this week is small and it is honest arithmetic, not news. Two joins have to land for a column to shift — a perforated interval from the RRC and a proppant mass from FracFocus — and the Sep 5 file added 42 joined wells overall, of which 26 landed in 2026 and 16 in 2025. Eleven pounds off the 2026 median on a 9% larger sample and two pounds onto 2025 is what a filling-in preliminary year looks like. The equilibrium holds; the 2026 column is simply becoming a real number rather than an early one.

The sand bill still doubled — but sideways. Median perforated interval went from 7,642 ft (2016) to 10,508 ft (2025), and median sand per well from 11.8M to 24.6M lb. The growth was laterals, not loading. The 2026 wells joined so far run a median 10,927 ft at the same loading, which is the whole thesis in one line.

Design still isn't monolithic: among 2025–26 completions, Pioneer's median well takes 30.7M lb (n = 745) against Diamondback's 20.7M (n = 827) — same basin, same benches, a ten-million-pound difference in what shows up on the pad. That line is computed sand-only, with no perf join.

Method: proppant = disclosed mass of crystalline silica (CAS 14808-60-7) summed per disclosure; perforated interval = RRC W-2/G-1 perf span joined by API (2,000–20,000 ft sanity); medians throughout; filings over 100M lb excluded as data errors; a perf span from a recompletion can differ from the original lateral — a small minority of joins. The joined-well count is taken after the sand and lateral filters. 2026 reflects wells both frac'd and filed with the RRC — it will keep drifting as the year fills in, and this week is the first issue in which that drift is visible.

Weekly frac job count — trailing 13 weeks

By job end date. Faded columns are recent weeks still filling in — operators have up to ~30 days to file, so the newest weeks always start low and grow. The newest column, the week ending Sep 7, is ZERO, and that is filing lag rather than a shutdown. The newest job end anywhere in this week's extract is 2026-08-26, so no job ending in the week to Sep 7 has been filed yet by anyone. The bar will fill in over the next month exactly as the week ending Aug 31 has: it printed 9 this morning against the 1 job that last issue's newest column showed. Fade rule, stated plainly: a column is faded when any day inside it is less than 42 days back, i.e. when it is not yet fully inside the settled window. That fades 5 of the 13 columns, the same rule and the same count as last issue.
113
6/15
82
6/22
91
6/29
54
7/6
93
7/13
63
7/20
68
7/27
66
8/3
41
8/10
61
8/17
39
8/24
9
8/31
0
9/7
Texas New Mexico still filing

Permian rig count — 268 +1 wk/wk

Active drilling rigs in the Permian, weekly · latest 2026-09-04 · the basin peaked at 318 rigs in Apr 2024 and has now added one to 268, ending two flat weeks at 267, still up 30 from the February low of 238 and the highest print since late June 2025, when the count was 270. Note the wording is unchanged from last week even though the number rose: the rule is tie-inclusive, so 268 does not set a new anchor — the anchor only moves at 271 · Source: Baker Hughes
2402502603/136/129/4268

Drilling vs completions pace — trailing 30 weeks

Rigs drill the wells; frac crews complete them. Orange is Permian rigs; blue is frac jobs ended each week from FracFocus. Read the right-hand end of the blue line as unfiled, not idle. The newest point, 2026-09-04, is 0 frac jobs against 268 rigs — that is not a basin that stopped completing wells, it is a week nobody has filed for yet (newest job end in the extract: 2026-08-26). The five newest points are all unsettled — the same 42-day rule that fades 5 of the 13 bars on the weekly chart above. Judge the blue line from the middle of the series. The gap between the two lines is the DUC build showing up in real time, and New Mexico's regulator now counts 4,630 drilled-and-waiting wells, up 117 this week — the largest build we have recorded. The national frac-spread series remains unsourced this issue. · Sources: Baker Hughes; FracFocus
801602402/135/299/4268
Permian rigs Frac jobs/week (FracFocus)

Most active operators

Bar & big number = settled pace (wells/28d from jobs ended 42–126 days back); gray number = jobs filed in the last 28 days. Diamondback holds the top slot at 31.7, but it sheds ground doing it: that is 6.3 below the 38.0 that last issue's own window recomputes to on this week's filings, and 5.0 below the 36.7 it printed on the day. Devon is the only large gainer at 22.7 (+2.7), and the only other riser is COG (ConocoPhillips) at 18.3 (+1.3); the remaining eight are flat or down, which is what a 65-disclosure filing week looks like from the operator side. Four of the top ten filed nothing at all in the last 28 days — Occidental, Cimarex, Chevron and Apache — and a fifth, Pioneer (ExxonMobil), filed just 2. That is filing lag rather than idleness; every one of them still holds its settled place. Method note: operators are shown as filed on the disclosure — no ownership roll-ups — so Pioneer and XTO (both ExxonMobil), and Cimarex (Coterra, now Devon) appear separately. Operators marked · / ·· file moderately / slowly, so recent filings alone understate them. EOG is still absent — it filed nothing this week, so it still reads 1.7/28d and still does not qualify. See the lead story.
Diamondback
31.7
22
XTO (ExxonMobil)
24.0
17
Occidental ·
23.7
0
Devon
22.7
12
COG (ConocoPhillips)
18.3
10
Permian Resources
17.7
5
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)
16.7
2
Cimarex (Coterra/Devon) ·
15.0
0
Chevron ·
11.7
0
Apache
11.0
0
Mewbourne Oil
10.7
0
Matador
10.3
7
Blackbeard Operating ·
8.7
0
Civitas (SM Energy)
8.0
0
Avant Operating II ·
5.7
0

Activity by county

Jobs ended in last 28 days (sums to 109). Martin takes the lead at 24, up from 8 last issue — the biggest single-county move on the board — and Lea drops to second at 23 from 29. New Mexico takes 32.1% of the basin's filed jobs against 34.7% when last issue's own 28-day window is recomputed on this morning's filings (52 New Mexico jobs of 150). Last issue printed 40.2% on the day; that gap is filing lag, not a swing in activity, so the recompute is the comparator to use — as last issue's own correction established. Midland is still 2, exactly where it was last issue, and has not recovered: the county that led this table through most of the summer has now printed two jobs twice running. Read that as filing lag as much as activity — the Midland-basin filers are the slower ones this cycle — but two issues at two is worth watching.
Martin, TX
24
Lea, NM
23
Upton, TX
16
Eddy, NM
11
Glasscock, TX
6
Howard, TX
6
Reeves, TX
6
Crane, TX
5
Andrews, TX
3
Loving, TX
2
Midland, TX
2
Winkler, TX
2
Chaves, NM
1
Ector, TX
1
Kent, TX
1

Completion pipeline — New Mexico (work coming to a pad near you)

From NM OCD well records (queried Sep 8), horizontal wells in Lea / Eddy / Chaves / Roosevelt: 8,489 approved permits not yet spudded (the drilling backlog — includes stale, unexercised permits of all vintages) and 4,630 wells spudded 2024–2026 still carried as "New" — drilled or drilling with no completion on record, the OCD's closest thing to a DUC list. This week the two series break trend in opposite directions, and both breaks are firsts. The permit bank fell 49 to 8,489 — the first decline in the series we have recorded (the three prior weeks ran +93, +62, +72). The DUC proxy built 117 to 4,630, the largest weekly build we have recorded (prior weeks +21, +34, +44), and it is almost all 2026 spuds (999, +62). Permits are being converted into drilled wells faster than new permits arrive, and the drilled wells are not being completed. EOG is 32% of that build on its own; EOG and Mewbourne together are 51%. EOG's unspudded stack fell a third straight week and by the widest margin yet, down 28 to 971, while its DUC stack rose +37 to 852 — and it filed no completions at all (see the lead story). Devon's mirror image has softened: it still built, 1,326 → 1,338 on its own filer name (1,442 once WPX Energy Permian rolls in, as the table below does), but at half last week's pace (+24 → +12), and its DUC stack is no longer flat (408 → 414, +6, on that same filer name; 453 rolled up). Read that second column as the table prints it and Devon is still fifth, behind Permian Resources at 471 — the +6 does not change its rank. Every well in that second column needs a frac crew and a drillout. Operators are grouped into display families as in previous issues — Devon includes WPX Energy Permian, Permian Resources includes Earthstone and Admiral, XTO includes both XTO entities, Occidental the three Oxy entities, and COG includes ConocoPhillips Company; Marathon Oil Permian is shown on its own line. Otherwise as filed with the OCD; parentheses note current owners.
OperatorPermits (unspudded) Spudded '24–'26, awaiting completionTop county
Devon1,442453Lea
EOG Resources971852Lea
Permian Resources742471Eddy
Mewbourne Oil577582Eddy
Matador668349Lea
Coterra (Cimarex)681262Lea
XTO (ExxonMobil)306603Eddy
Occidental486228Eddy
COG (ConocoPhillips)55029Lea
Chevron266276Eddy
Marathon Oil (ConocoPhillips)23926Lea
Spur Energy Partners139115Eddy
Riley Permian19620Eddy
Civitas (SM Energy)11460Lea

Completion pipeline — Texas permit backlog

The Texas permit numbers in this issue are frozen, and this is the FIFTH issue in a row that they are. Read nothing at all into their stability. daf804 is a monthly file; the RRC's file list was re-checked live this morning and still shows exactly one file, last modified 8 Aug 2026, with permits issued through Aug 7. So this chart, both permit tables below, and the permit columns of the momentum table are all identical to the Aug 10, Aug 17, Aug 24 and Aug 31 issues by construction — not because permitting stopped, and not because anything was measured. A permit arrow anywhere in this issue is now a month old and getting older, and no comparison drawn from these tables is a comparison with this week. It also has a compounding second-order effect: the county map book runs on a trailing-365-day window, and because that window advances weekly against a static file, the map point count has now fallen for four straight issues, 3,961 → 3,891 → 3,831 → 3,775 — 56 permits aged out this week and none arrived. That shrinkage is an artifact of the frozen file, not a collapse in Texas permitting, and it will keep happening every week until the file moves. 4,782 permits issued Aug 2025 – Aug 7, 2026 in the Permian counties, 4,097 of them horizontal (85.7%). July is a complete month at 396 permits; August is partial — the file runs only through Aug 7, so the last column is a stub, not a cliff. Permits lead the frac by six to twelve months.
308
8/25
371
9/25
475
10/25
236
11/25
305
12/25
491
1/26
327
2/26
422
3/26
473
4/26
468
5/26
408
6/26
396
7/26
102
8/26

Permit holders — trailing 12 months

Permits issued Aug 2025 – Aug 7, 2026 by operator, resolved from the P-5 number by API join to FracFocus filings (93.62% coverage, 4,477 of 4,782; the remaining 305 are small P-5 numbers with no FracFocus history and are shown as "Unknown"). Anadarko-numbered permits are counted under Occidental. Same Aug 8 file as the last four issues, so every count below is unchanged — the operator-name vote was re-run against this week's fresher FracFocus and moved twenty-two P-5 numbers, only two of which carry any in-window permit at all (two permits each: RK → Beach, and Canan Mowrey → Three Summits). No row of the underlying top-40 table moves; the unresolved bucket shrinks from 309 to 305 as the fresher vote names four more.
OperatorPermits
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)588
Occidental508
Diamondback480
Unknown305
COG (ConocoPhillips)198
Permian Resources164
Ovintiv157
Apache148
Continental Resources127
Double Eagle (DE Central)127
Blackbeard Operating124
Kinder Morgan100

Permit counties — trailing 12 months

Same window and the same Aug 8 file, so these are last issue's counts to the permit — and the three issues before that. Midland still leads, but the Delaware side (Loving, Reeves) carries as many permits between two counties as the Midland Basin core does. Nothing here has been measured since Aug 7.
CountyPermits
Midland626
Loving485
Upton482
Reeves459
Martin441
Glasscock267
Reagan253
Andrews229
Crane177
Ector177
Gaines175
Howard151

Smaller operators to watch

Everyone outside the top-10 settled list with 3+ completions since March 29 — the private and mid-cap programs that buy sand, water, and services every month without making headlines. The window is the anchor date minus 163 days, which is the same offset the last four issues used. Large independents (Mewbourne, Civitas, Matador, Ovintiv, Continental) are excluded regardless of count, and so is EOG, which would otherwise walk into this table as a "smaller operator" on a settled pace of 1.7 — which it plainly is not. Green dates = a job ended inside the last ~30 days, i.e. a crew was just there. Service co. from supplier records where identifiable.
OperatorJobs (5 mo)Top counties Service co. (ID'd)Median water (bbl)Newest job
Blackbeard Operating29 Crane TX 119,0002026-07-23
FireBird Energy II27 Upton TX, Ector TX 485,0002026-08-24
VTX Energy21 Reeves TXNexTier (Patterson-UTI) 637,0002026-08-26
Spur Energy Partners20 Eddy NM, Lea NMHalliburton 281,0002026-08-04
Fasken Oil and Ranch20 Andrews TX, Midland TX 507,0002026-08-12
HighPeak Energy20 Howard TX, Borden TXLiberty, ProFrac 480,0002026-07-03
Triple Crown Resources19 Irion TX, Upton TX 576,0002026-08-25
BPX19 Reeves TX, Loving TXHalliburton, NexTier (Patterson-UTI) 497,0002026-05-30
Surge Energy18 Howard TX, Borden TXNexTier (Patterson-UTI) 416,0002026-08-11
Avant Operating II17 Lea NMLiberty 341,0002026-07-17
TRP Operating15 Loving TX 542,0002026-07-09
BTA Oil Producers13 Crane TX, Lea NMFTS International 716,0002026-08-12
Summit Petroleum12 Upton TXFTS International 786,0002026-05-25
Basin Oil and Gas12 Winkler TX, Ector TX 4,0002026-08-17
Blue Arrow12 Reeves TX, Pecos TX 631,0002026-07-13
Double Eagle (DE Central)12 Glasscock TX, Reagan TXHalliburton, NexTier (Patterson-UTI) 559,0002026-05-07
Read the Basin Oil and Gas row with suspicion. Its median disclosed water is 4,064 bbl across 12 jobs; every other row in this table runs between about 119,000 and 786,000 bbl, and the two rows immediately either side of it are 786,000 and 631,000. That is two orders of magnitude below anything that could be a modern Permian frac, and on the order of a fraction of a barrel per lateral foot. These disclosures are almost certainly not describing full stimulation jobs (a recompletion, a partial filing, or a units error are all likelier than a 4,000-bbl frac). The row is left in rather than quietly dropped, but it should not be read as a completions programme. The same operator supplies the top of the fleets-on-location table below, which carries the same caveat.

Completion intensity by operator

Median job design over each operator's trailing 12 months · operators with ≥8 jobs and a disclosure inside the last 6 months, sorted by median sand · sand in millions of lbs, water in thousands of bbl · the lateral and lb/ft columns stay blank again this issue. The join was re-checked against the fresh Sep 5 RRC dbf900 and it is still too thin and too biased to print: median perforated-interval coverage across the 18 rows below is 36.1% (43.7% job-weighted), 3 rows sit under 25%, and among the basin's biggest programmes XTO joins on 1.3% of its jobs (4 of 309). The wells that do join are the ones whose operators file promptly, and they skew high: the values that would have printed run 2,070–2,986 lb/ft. That range is not like-for-like with the 1,996 lb/ft in the sand-per-foot special above — 1,996 is the 2026-to-date, preliminary, nine-county Midland-Basin median from that card, while these are trailing-12-month, basin-wide, per-operator medians. Printing them would say more about paperwork than about design. They are retained in the build data if anyone wants to argue the point. The basin-wide perf join is shown properly in the sand-per-foot special above, where the history is deep enough to be honest. One calibration warning about the top of this table. The rows are sorted by median sand, so the least calibrated rows come first: Petroplex Energy leads on 20 jobs, and without the suppressed per-foot column there is nothing on the page to say whether a big median sand number is a big frac or simply a long lateral — or, at the top of the table, a small sample. Treat the first few rows as small-n and uncalibrated until the lb/ft column can be printed.
OperatorJobsMedian sand (M lbs) Median water (k bbl)Median lateral (ft)Sand (lbs/ft)
Petroplex Energy20 38.9744
SM Energy16 36.0871
Discovery Natural Resources15 35.11206
Black Swan11 34.1786
RP Operating10 33.71042
PBEX Operations14 31.3696
Continental Resources40 30.5763
HighPeak Energy43 29.8502
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)415 29.6647
BTA Oil Producers39 29.1618
Summit Petroleum31 28.7547
Sabalo II Operating11 28.1514
XTO (ExxonMobil)309 27.2531
Blue Arrow24 27.1631
Tap Rock18 27.1602
Double Eagle (DE Central)67 26.2587
VTX Energy31 25.5638
Occidental403 25.3467

Water & sand by well depth (TVD)

Trailing 12 months, both states, by disclosed true vertical depth. The shallow band is a different business — a third of the sand and just over half the water of every deeper band. Below that line the design is remarkably flat: from 7,000 ft to past 12,000 ft the median job barely moves, which is the lateral-length story again rather than a depth story. Four of the five bands move by 16 jobs or fewer as the 12-month window rolls; the exception is 10,500 - 12,000, which is down 32 (866 → 834). And the New Mexico share of the deep bands is not moving in one direction, so this issue does not claim it is: 9,000 - 10,500 34.06% → 34.09%; 10,500 - 12,000 49.54% → 49.64%; over 12,000 ft 62.85% → 62.19% — two of the three up by 0.03 and 0.10 of a percentage point, the deepest band down 0.66. That is noise at this sample size, not a trend. The Lea/Eddy concentration the county table shows is real; this table is not where you can watch it move.
TVD bandJobsMedian water (bbl) Median proppant (lbs)of which NM
under 7,000 ft365284,000 7,694,00083
7,000 - 9,0001,610516,000 23,468,000329
9,000 - 10,5001,640532,000 25,211,000559
10,500 - 12,000834512,000 24,546,000414
over 12,000 ft320532,000 24,696,000199

Water & sand by target formation — Texas

Texas jobs ended in the trailing 12 months (3,185), formation from the RRC wellbore join — 1,933 named (60.7%). One method change this issue, and it is honest to report that it did nothing. A non-empty-name gate was added to the RRC formation join: the join takes the deepest filed bench record on the wellbore, and the wellbore file contains 266 roots whose deepest record carries a blank formation name, 184 of them with a positive filed depth — which means they would clear the existing depth gate and be counted as "named" while bucketing to nothing at all. The gate is correct and it ships. Its effect on this table is exactly zero: none of the 3,185 trailing-12-month Texas jobs lands on one of those roots, and every row below is identical with and without it. All the row movement this week is data — the window rolling and the fresh Sep 5 wellbore file — not method. The depth > 0 gate introduced last issue still applies (127 of the 2,193 joinable jobs are excluded by it), as do last issue's San Angelo and Delaware Mtn bucket changes. Rows with fewer than 10 named jobs are dropped, which this cycle removes Grayburg (8), Strawn (7), Barnett (4), Penn (4). Strawn and Penn still cannot be reproduced at their historic values. The Aug 17 issue printed a Strawn row of 38 and the Aug 24 issue a Penn row of 20; this window contains 7 disclosures whose deepest RRC bench string contains "STRAWN" — 7 with the depth gate lifted, i.e. unchanged — and 4 Pennsylvanian-aged strings (5 before the depth gate). Both fall to the under-10 rule again, and those earlier figures should be read as artifacts of those builds. The 12-month window is the honest unit for this join: the RRC completion filing trails the frac by months, so a 28-day window could name only 6 of 51 jobs when it was tried. New Mexico is excluded (the OCD pool join was not refreshed this cycle). lb/ft is the median of per-well sand ÷ perf span with a 2,000–20,000 ft gate, and prints "—" where fewer than 10 wells in the row carry a perf record. Because the RRC filing trails the frac, the named rows still skew toward operators that file promptly.
FormationJobsMedian water (bbl) Median proppant (lbs)Sand (lbs/ft)
Spraberry772549,000 24,625,0002,001
Wolfcamp629560,000 24,352,0002,258
Bone Spring224496,000 24,733,0002,492
Dean114589,000 26,981,0002,182
Clear Fork100491,000 17,632,0001,694
Delaware Mtn38652,000 24,487,0002,404
San Andres23507,000 23,132,0002,245
Queen10695,000 29,339,000

Current conditions — fleets likely on location (inferred)

The rule, in full, because it matters more than the number: a pad is an operator plus a surface location rounded to two decimal places of latitude and longitude (about a 1 km grid); a pad counts as "likely on location" when its latest job end is within 1.5× that pad's own median gap between job end dates. There is no minimum-days floor, and the count is not rounded to any floor either. On that rule 75 pads pass this issue, against the 76 last issue published; recompute last issue's window on this week's fuller data and the same rule still returns 76, so the fall to 75 is one real pad, not a rule change and not late filing. Now the honest part, and read it before you read the table. 36 of those 75 pads have a median inter-job gap of more than a year, so on a strict reading of the rule they "pass" on a job-end date that is itself months old. The freshest of them this week is a COG pad in Eddy County whose own median gap is 1,462 days. The table below is therefore drawn from the safer list — the 39 pads whose median gap is under a year — while the 75 headline above refers to the full no-floor list. Those are two different lists and the difference is 36 pads; read the "pad gap" column before you read the status either way. Several large operators batch-date a whole pad's wells to one end date, which zeroes their measured gap and drops them out of the green list entirely — so this view skews toward smaller, steadier programs. Disclosures lag the frac by up to 30 days; treat this as a floor and a lead list, not a map. The "recently released" rows are the freshest pads whose own cadence says the crew has moved on — and the EOG pad in Lea County, 25 wells, last job end Aug 24, is still sitting there a week later with nothing new filed behind it.
StatusOperatorService co.County Wells so farPad gap (d)Last job end
🟢 Likely on locationBasin Oil and Gas Winkler, TX7 156Aug 17
🟢 Likely on locationBasin Oil and Gas Winkler, TX5 189Aug 13
🟢 Likely on locationRing Energy Ector, TX4 30Aug 11
🟢 Likely on locationSurge EnergyNexTier (Patterson-UTI) Howard, TX6 155Aug 11
🟢 Likely on locationBasin Oil and Gas Winkler, TX8 89Aug 10
🟢 Likely on locationSurge EnergyNexTier (Patterson-UTI) Howard, TX8 92Jul 31
🟢 Likely on locationBurnett Oil Eddy, NM15 77Jul 25
🟢 Likely on locationBlackbeard Operating Crane, TX6 105Jul 23
🟢 Likely on locationBurnett Oil Eddy, NM6 204Jul 22
🟢 Likely on locationStrata Eddy, NM2 165Jul 18
⚪ Recently releasedVTX Energy Reeves, TX5 0Aug 26
⚪ Recently releasedPioneer (ExxonMobil)Halliburton, NexTier (Patterson-UTI) Midland, TX26 0Aug 25
⚪ Recently releasedTriple Crown Resources Upton, TX4 0Aug 25
⚪ Recently releasedEOG Lea, NM25 1Aug 24
⚪ Recently releasedFireBird Energy II Upton, TX6 0Aug 24
And read the top of the green list with the same suspicion as the smaller-operators table above. The first two rows, and a third just below them, are all Basin Oil and Gas pads in Winkler County, and Basin's disclosures carry a median water volume of about 4,000 bbl per job — two orders of magnitude below a Permian frac. Whatever those filings describe, it is probably not a frac crew on location. The rows are shown rather than dropped, because the rule put them there and hiding them would hide the weakness; but the head of this list is the least trustworthy part of it, and the rule keys on filing cadence, not on job size.

Frac service companies — who's pumping for whom

Pressure pumper identified on 61.1% of the last 12 months' jobs (2,916 of 4,769) — from FracFocus supplier records directly, plus same-pad propagation (a labeled sibling well within the pad names the crew, matched on a 3-decimal-place pad grid over the full disclosure history). Coverage is flat like-for-like against last issue's 61.0%: the name list did not change this week, so the movement is jobs rolling through the 12-month window, not method. ProFrac and FTS International are shown separately, as published — the raw matcher folds FTSI and the old U.S. Well Services spelling into ProFrac, and splitting them back out gives ProFrac 277 and FTS International 81. KLX is deliberately excluded: it is coil and wireline work, not a frac fleet. The rows below sum to 3,022 against 2,916 identified jobs, because 106 jobs name more than one pumper and are counted under each — the same disclosure the last four issues carried. "Not identified" jobs are genuinely unlabeled in public data — largely self-sourcing operators and ProPetro's current work — so shares are a floor, not a census.
Service co.Jobs (12 mo)
Halliburton1,291
NexTier (Patterson-UTI)706
Liberty589
ProFrac277
FTS International81
BJ Energy Solutions43
SLB35
Not identified1,853

Implied frac fleets & drillout demand

Transparent math, two assumptions: a frac fleet turns ~5.6 wells per 28 days (the basin-average throughput calibrated in the July issue: 398 wells ↔ 71 fleet-equivalents), and a coil/workover unit drills out ~6 wells per month. Fleet-equivalents = settled wells/28d ÷ 5.6; drillout units = wells/28d ÷ 6. Method note: too many operators batch-date pad filings for per-pad cadence to be reliable, so a single basin-average throughput is used — simul-frac heavy operators' true crew counts run lower than shown, and slower programs' higher. Basin total on this basis: 308.0 wells/28d ≈ 55 fleet-equivalents and ≈ 51 drillout units kept busy, down from 58 / 54 last issue. The pace eased 14.3 against the 322.3 we printed then (down 4.4%), and 17.7 against the 325.7 that the same window recomputes to on this week's filings — and this week that easing is mostly a thin filing week, not a thinner basin. Every figure here understates EOG, which is not on the settled list at all.
OperatorWells / 28d (settled) Implied fleet-equiv.Implied drillout units
Diamondback31.7 5.75.3
XTO (ExxonMobil)24.0 4.34.0
Occidental23.7 4.23.9
Devon22.7 4.13.8
COG (ConocoPhillips)18.3 3.33.1
Permian Resources17.7 3.22.9
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)16.7 3.02.8
Cimarex (Coterra/Devon)15.0 2.72.5
Chevron11.7 2.11.9
Apache11.0 2.01.8
Mewbourne Oil10.7 1.91.8
Matador10.3 1.81.7
Blackbeard Operating8.7 1.61.4
Civitas (SM Energy)8.0 1.41.3
Avant Operating II5.7 1.01.0

Estimated completion spend — run-rate per 28 days

A rebuilt, per-lateral-foot model of what a Permian completion costs and what the basin spends at its current pace. Four foot-priced service lines, proppant and water passed through at disclosed volumes, three flat per-well lines. It runs on the settled window — jobs whose end date is 42–126 days back, 924 of them (329 New Mexico / 595 Texas) between 2026-05-06 and 2026-07-28 — not the 28-day tile at the top of the issue. The settled window is the only population on which a per-28-day total is comparable week to week; the tile is a floor that grows for a month after publication.
Per median settled well
$4,227,113
median settled job: 24,688,616 lb sand (n = 792), 519,455 bbl water, 79.5% produced/recycled by volume
Per completed lateral foot
$407.59
on a median lateral of 10,371 ft · completion only, no drilling
Basin, per 28 days
$1.302B
= the per-well figure × the settled pace of 308.0 jobs/28d
LineBasisRate $ on the median well% of well
Pumping spread & stimulation service$ / lateral ft $125 $1,296,37530.7%
Wireline, plugs & pumpdown$ / lateral ft $50 $518,55012.3%
Chemicals & additives$ / lateral ft $20 $207,4204.9%
Site, rentals, supervision, fuel & other$ / lateral ft $30 $311,1307.4%
Proppant delivered$ / lb $0.016 $395,0189.3%
Produced / recycled water$ / bbl × 79.5% of the barrels $0.50 $206,4834.9%
Fresh water$ / bbl × the remaining 20.5% $1.10 $117,1372.8%
Drillout — coil or workover rig$ / well $350,000 $350,0008.3%
Flowback & early production$ / well $225,000 $225,0005.3%
Tubing, wellhead & surface facilities$ / well $600,000 $600,00014.2%
The lateral distribution is bimodal, so the median understates the basin. On the 4,091-well 2025–early-2026 perf cohort, 38% of laterals land in the 10,000–11,000 ft two-mile band and 14% in the 15,000–16,000 ft three-mile band — so pricing "the median well" prices neither of the two things the basin actually drills, and roughly one job in seven is a three-miler the median hides. Those three shape figures are the only numbers in this card not re-derived this week: they come from the Texas perf cohort measured for this model's Sep 2 build — job ends Jan 2025 – Feb 2026, read off the Sep 1 FracFocus extract and the Aug 29 RRC wellbore file — and they are carried unchanged because the shape of the distribution moves far more slowly than the window does. The band below is the honest read: the same rate card run at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile lateral. Note that $/ft falls as the lateral grows, because $1,175,000 of the well is flat per-well cost that does not scale with length.
CaseLateral (ft)Cost per well $ per lateral ft
p25 - short 2-mile10,046 $4,153,988$413.50
p50 - median10,371 $4,227,113$407.59
p75 - 3-mile13,621 $4,958,363$364.02
Where the lateral comes from, stated honestly, because it is the largest weakness in the number. There is no direct lateral for a job in the settled window: the RRC perf records that carry it land four to eight months after the frac, and only 0.6% of settled-window jobs join one at all. The model therefore uses a lagged cohort — Texas jobs whose end date is 365 to 180 days before the issue date (2025-09-07 to 2026-03-11), where the perf join reaches 76.2% of Texas jobs and n = 1,451. Two consequences, both real: the lateral is Texas-only (dbf900 is an RRC file and New Mexico never joins it, while New Mexico is a third of every window), and it describes wells completed six to twelve months earlier than the ones being priced. It is a stable, slow-moving distribution, which is why it is usable at all — but it is not this quarter's laterals.
Sanity check, and it is a standing rule here. Divide any well cost by its lateral and compare it to what operators guide to. This model is $408/ft for the completion alone; add roughly $300/ft of drilling and it implies ≈$708/ft all-in, against public Permian D&C guidance of $675–$1,035/ft (Permian Resources $675–$685, Civitas Midland $685, Matador $835–$855, Civitas Delaware $880, Delaware peer range $775–$1,035). It sits at the bottom of that band, which is where a completion-only number rebuilt from first principles should sit. A completion-only figure that exceeds an all-in figure is the tell that something is wrong — that is exactly what caught the previous version of this model, which read about $980/ft for the completion alone.
⚠ Three of the ten rates are proposals, not operator-supplied numbers, and they are the three flat lines. Drillout — coil or workover rig ($350,000/well), flowback & early production ($225,000/well) and tubing, wellhead & surface facilities ($600,000/well) together are $1,175,000, or 27.8% of the modelled well. They came from this newsletter, not from an operator or a service company. The drillout figure is practitioner-endorsed — it is our own discipline — but flowback and facilities remain open, and facilities may be a scope question rather than a rate question: Civitas quotes drilling, completion and facilities per foot, while Permian Resources books facilities and infrastructure outside D&C entirely. Take facilities out of scope and the well is $3.63M at $350/ft; take flowback out too and it is $3.40M at $328/ft. The six volume-priced lines are better grounded and are benchmarked against the guidance band above, but they are proposals as well. Every figure in this card moves when those rates do. Estimates for market intelligence, not invoices.

What the wells actually made — IP90 after the frac

Nothing in this section moved, and this issue can say exactly why. The whole pipeline was rebuilt from scratch again rather than carried forward, and it reproduced every published number exactly: all 3,357 Texas wells and all 2,843 New Mexico wells came back with identical oil and gas volumes — zero missing, zero extra, zero mismatched. Two things had to be true for that to happen and both are: the Texas production file is frozen, so there are no new production months for any well, and the two new Texas cohort wells the fresh FracFocus added both sit on multi-well leases and are excluded by the single-well-lease rule. A no-change result is the expected outcome here, not a suspicious one.
Both production vintages are stale, one is past our own refresh rule for a second week, and this week we could not even confirm its vintage. The Texas side runs on the RRC Production Data Query dump of Jul 26 — 44 days, 6.3 weeks old, past the five-week rule this newsletter set itself, for the second consecutive issue. Worse than last week: the RRC file-transfer server aborts the TLS handshake outright from our host — it returns zero bytes and no certificate — so the PDQ vintage could not be listed, let alone downloaded, and MFT is the only channel the RRC publishes it through. (The RRC's GIS and web servers answered normally throughout, so this is that one server or an address-level block, not an outage.) The New Mexico side runs on OCD C-115 well-level volumes scraped on Aug 5 — now 34 days stale, because the OCD production route sits behind a Cloudflare human-verification gate; re-probed this morning, and the cookie jar comes back empty, so no retry strategy can clear it. Treat every figure below as a July-vintage read.
Wells frac'd July 2024 – Feb 2026, 6,200 with a clean 90-day production window (2,843 New Mexico + 3,357 Texas). New Mexico: true well-level oil volumes from OCD C-115 filings. Texas: oil + condensate from RRC lease-level filings, restricted to single-well leases — leases carrying exactly one wellbore on the proration schedule, so lease volumes are well volumes with no pad allocation; that keeps 3,357 of 6,703 TX cohort wells (50%; the rest sit on multi-well leases). Where a well touches more than one single-well lease, the lease with the largest windowed oil volume is used. All three months of a well's window must carry a filed row; wells with production predating the frac (refracs, legacy leases) are excluded. IP90 = oil over the first three reported production months ÷ 90 days. Median across all 6,200 wells: 692 bopd (NM 762, TX 638); median gas 1,250 mcfd.
FormationWellsMedian IP90 (bopd/well) bopd per 1,000 ft
Wolfcamp2390690 65
Bone Spring2053768 63
Spraberry1209639 52
Dean175726 55
Clear Fork137561 50
Barnett73602 62
Delaware Mtn35576
Yeso35225
San Andres25170 21
Penn17298
Strawn12536 51
Queen11438 42
Other / unreported28374 26
OperatorWellsMedian IP90 (bopd/well)
ExxonMobil (Pioneer/XTO)1191700
Devon (incl. Coterra)622895
EOG Resources542857
Mewbourne Oil509625
Occidental413997
Permian Resources364672
Diamondback339745
Chevron301611
ConocoPhillips (COG)258759
Matador Production236622
Per-1,000-ft columns are Texas-weighted: laterals come from the RRC perf join (3,255 TX wells) and from OCD completion reports for only 62 NM wells, so a dash means the lateral sample was under 10. These laterals are deliberately held at the Aug 15 wellbore file, not the fresh Sep 5 one. Refreshing the perf half alone would be clean — it fills 42 blanks and moves exactly one printed cell — but the formation half would not be: 125 of the 1,911 Spraberry (Trend Area) wells would flip bucket on the new file, and the published mapping is not reproducible one-to-one against it. Refreshing one half and not the other would mix bases, so both are held until that rule is pinned down. Operator rows here use ownership roll-ups (unlike the rest of the issue) because the production files are keyed to current operatorship. Note that EOG sits third on this table at 542 wells and 857 bopd — its production filings never went dark even while its FracFocus paperwork did, and its paperwork has gone quiet again this week.

Who's ramping, who's easing off

Three signals per operator: settled pace (wells/28d, jobs ended 42–126 days back) against its own prior three-month window (126–210 days back); TX permits issued in the trailing 8 weeks (Jun 13 – Aug 7) against the prior 8 weeks (intent — leads the frac 6–12 months; arrows at ±20%); and jobs filed in the last 28 days as a share of settled pace (a filing-freshness read, not a slowdown detector — slow filers run low here every issue). The universe is every operator on the settled-pace list above, i.e. 5.5 wells/28d or better. ⚠ The permit column is frozen for a fifth issue and is not comparable to anything. The RRC permit file is monthly and still ends Aug 7, so every permit arrow in this table is now a month old and is identical to the arrow printed in the Aug 10, Aug 17, Aug 24 and Aug 31 issues. It is not a measurement of this week. Read movement in the first column only — and read it against a filing week in which only 65 new disclosures arrived. Hover a row for the figures. The "Reads as" rule is unchanged from last issue (a filer is current only when its filing-currency flag reads current AND its filed share is at least 40% of settled pace), so this column is row-comparable to last issue but still not to the Aug 24 issue and earlier, which used a filed-share threshold alone.
OperatorSettled pace /28dTX permits Filed last 28dReads as
Diamondback ▼ 31.7vs 43.7 prior 3 mo ▼ 288 wk to Aug 7 · vs 79 prior 8 wk 22 (69%) genuinely easing — filings are current, so the drop is real
XTO (ExxonMobil) · 24.0vs 29.3 prior 3 mo no TX permits in either window 17 (71%) holding pace, and filings are current
Occidental ▼ 23.7vs 41.7 prior 3 mo ▼ 428 wk to Aug 7 · vs 102 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) off on paper, and filing slowly — likely lag as much as a real slowdown
Devon ▲ 22.7vs 17.7 prior 3 mo no TX permits in either window 12 (53%) pace up on settled filings; permit intake not following yet
COG (ConocoPhillips) · 18.3vs 20.3 prior 3 mo ▲ 518 wk to Aug 7 · vs 29 prior 8 wk 10 (55%) holding pace, and filings are current
Permian Resources ▼ 17.7vs 23.3 prior 3 mo ▼ 168 wk to Aug 7 · vs 44 prior 8 wk 5 (28%) off on paper, and filing slowly — likely lag as much as a real slowdown
Pioneer (ExxonMobil) ▼ 16.7vs 34.3 prior 3 mo · 1088 wk to Aug 7 · vs 112 prior 8 wk 2 (12%) off on paper, and filing slowly — likely lag as much as a real slowdown
Cimarex (Coterra/Devon) · 15.0vs 16.7 prior 3 mo ▼ 08 wk to Aug 7 · vs 22 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) holding pace; a slow filer, so recent weeks understate it
Chevron · 11.7vs 11.3 prior 3 mo ▲ 188 wk to Aug 7 · vs 4 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) holding pace; a slow filer, so recent weeks understate it
Apache ▼ 11.0vs 16.0 prior 3 mo ▼ 188 wk to Aug 7 · vs 33 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) off on paper, and filing slowly — likely lag as much as a real slowdown
Mewbourne Oil ▼ 10.7vs 20.3 prior 3 mo ▲ 188 wk to Aug 7 · vs 7 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) off on paper, and filing slowly — likely lag as much as a real slowdown
Matador · 10.3vs 9.3 prior 3 mo no TX permits in either window 7 (68%) holding pace, and filings are current
Blackbeard Operating ▲ 8.7vs 2.7 prior 3 mo ▼ 118 wk to Aug 7 · vs 36 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) pace up on settled filings; permit intake not following yet
Civitas (SM Energy) ▼ 8.0vs 11.7 prior 3 mo ▼ 58 wk to Aug 7 · vs 9 prior 8 wk 0 (0%) off on paper, and filing slowly — likely lag as much as a real slowdown
Avant Operating II ▲ 5.7vs 0.0 prior 3 mo no TX permits in either window 0 (0%) pace up on settled filings; permit intake not following yet

How current is each operator's paperwork?

Every operator with 8+ Permian disclosures in the trailing 18 months, sorted worst-first by how old its newest job-end date is. FracFocus has no enforced filing deadline, so this is a paperwork-currency table, not an activity table — a dark filer can be busy and a current filer can be idle. Late batches arrive constantly and revise settled pace upward afterward, which is why the lead recomputes last issue's window every week. Red = newest job over 120 days old (dark); amber = 42–120 days (slow); green = inside 42 days (current). Split this issue: 22 dark / 22 slow / 25 current across 69 rows, against last issue's 19 / 22 / 26 across 67. That drift is the calendar, not a filing collapse. Two operators (Hilcorp Energy and Circle-S Energy) newly cleared the 8-disclosure bar, and three — Double Eagle (DE Central), Ovintiv and Discovery — crossed the 120-day line simply because the anchor advanced seven days and they filed nothing. Blackbeard, Burnett and Occidental drifted the other way, green to amber, for the same reason. Only Triple Crown genuinely moved on filings, 70 days to 14. No operator went from filing to not filing.
OperatorNewest job on file Filed last 28dSettled pace /28d Disclosures, 18 mo
OxyRock 2025-08-28 (376d) 00.0 89
Rockport Energy Solutions 2025-10-10 (333d) 00.0 9
Fourpoint Energy 2025-11-19 (293d) 00.0 13
Iron Orchard 2025-12-09 (273d) 00.0 8
Upcurve Energy 2025-12-26 (256d) 00.0 17
Vital Energy 2026-01-16 (235d) 00.0 20
IKE 2026-01-16 (235d) 00.0 21
Unitex 2026-02-05 (215d) 00.0 8
Hannathon 2026-02-16 (204d) 00.0 18
Paloma Permian Assetco 2026-02-25 (195d) 00.0 22
Hibernia Resources IV 2026-03-02 (190d) 00.0 26
Petro Hunt L L C 2026-03-25 (167d) 00.0 56
Marathon 2026-04-04 (157d) 00.0 11
Dallas 2026-04-08 (153d) 00.0 9
SM Energy 2026-04-12 (149d) 00.0 61
Manti Tarka Permian 2026-04-22 (139d) 00.0 14
Petroplex Energy 2026-04-26 (135d) 00.0 20
Black Swan 2026-04-27 (134d) 00.0 27
Kaiser-Francis 2026-05-01 (130d) 00.0 15
Double Eagle (DE Central) 2026-05-07 (124d) 02.0 116
Ovintiv 2026-05-08 (123d) 01.0 89
Discovery Natural Resources 2026-05-09 (122d) 01.3 33
PBEX Operations 2026-05-12 (119d) 01.0 14
Summit Petroleum 2026-05-25 (106d) 01.0 58
Tap Rock 2026-05-30 (101d) 00.7 24
BPX 2026-05-30 (101d) 03.0 90
Sabalo II Operating 2026-06-15 (85d) 02.3 23
3R 2026-06-21 (79d) 01.7 24
Crescent Energy 2026-06-22 (78d) 01.3 13
Jetta 2026-06-25 (75d) 02.3 9
Permian Deep Rock 2026-06-27 (73d) 01.7 25
HighPeak Energy 2026-07-03 (67d) 05.0 70
TRP Operating 2026-07-09 (61d) 03.0 28
RP Operating 2026-07-10 (60d) 01.3 10
Cimarex (Coterra/Devon) 2026-07-11 (59d) 015.0 301
Chevron 2026-07-13 (57d) 011.7 295
Blue Arrow 2026-07-13 (57d) 02.7 28
Avant Operating II 2026-07-17 (53d) 05.7 17
Strata 2026-07-18 (52d) 02.3 23
Greenlake Energy 2026-07-19 (51d) 00.3 30
Blackbeard Operating 2026-07-23 (47d) 08.7 144
Hilcorp Energy 2026-07-23 (47d) 02.3 9
Burnett Oil 2026-07-25 (45d) 00.7 13
Occidental 2026-07-26 (44d) 023.7 578
Apache 2026-07-31 (39d) 011.0 236
Civitas (SM Energy) 2026-07-31 (39d) 08.0 161
Continental Resources 2026-08-01 (38d) 00.0 89
Spur Energy Partners 2026-08-04 (35d) 05.3 54
Mewbourne Oil 2026-08-05 (34d) 010.7 394
SEM 2026-08-07 (32d) 01.3 21
Surge Energy 2026-08-11 (28d) 21.7 79
Circle-s Energy 2026-08-11 (28d) 20.0 9
BTA Oil Producers 2026-08-12 (27d) 22.3 55
Fasken Oil and Ranch 2026-08-12 (27d) 24.7 81
Devon 2026-08-14 (25d) 1222.7 328
Basin Oil and Gas 2026-08-17 (22d) 22.0 54
COG (ConocoPhillips) 2026-08-18 (21d) 1018.3 406
Permian Resources 2026-08-18 (21d) 517.7 388
Mack 2026-08-18 (21d) 11.3 9
Diamondback 2026-08-22 (17d) 2231.7 763
Ring Energy 2026-08-22 (17d) 51.7 24
Bayswater 2026-08-22 (17d) 40.0 34
XTO (ExxonMobil) 2026-08-24 (15d) 1724.0 476
EOG 2026-08-24 (15d) 51.7 322
FireBird Energy II 2026-08-24 (15d) 23.0 99
Pioneer (ExxonMobil) 2026-08-25 (14d) 216.7 714
Matador 2026-08-25 (14d) 710.3 203
Triple Crown Resources 2026-08-25 (14d) 32.7 66
VTX Energy 2026-08-26 (13d) 32.7 42
The EOG line, one week on. Last issue this table reported EOG moving from the red band to the green one in a single step and said its settled pace would follow. It has not. EOG filed zero disclosures this week; its newest job end is still 2026-08-24, which has simply aged to 15 days; its settled pace is still 1.7; and its filed-last-28 count fell from 10 to 5 only because the 28-day window rolled forward off its Aug 4, 5 and 10 jobs — no July job was ever inside it. It is still flagged current, because that flag measures the age of the newest filing and nothing else — which is precisely the limitation this table has always carried, now demonstrated on the largest filer in the basin. Five of the names are still worse than 250 days — OxyRock at 376, Rockport Energy Solutions at 333, Fourpoint Energy at 293, Iron Orchard at 273 and Upcurve Energy at 256 — and they are the ones to watch next.

Biggest jobs of the period

Jobs ended in the last 90 days (759 of them), ranked by total base water volume — a wider window than the 28 days this table used until four issues ago, because at this filing vintage a 28-day window holds too few settled monsters to rank honestly. Pad siblings dominate the top of any such list: a four- or six-well pad filed on one end date will fill several rows with near-identical numbers, which is a batch completion, not six record jobs. The BUTTERS 5-series in Midland County still owns the book — Pioneer's 5E–5H remain the sand leaders and XTO's 5A–5L take the water slots (several disclose no proppant mass, hence the dashes), and both operators are ExxonMobil. Behind the Butters pad, the biggest jobs are FireBird Energy II's Beverly 4726 wells in Upton — FireBird is a Diamondback subsidiary, shown as filed under this issue's no-roll-ups convention. Note the whole table is now at least two months old at the newest — the freshest row on it ended Jul 2, 67 days back: the June 10 Butters jobs have simply not been displaced, because almost nothing filed this week.
OperatorWellCounty Water (bbl)Proppant (lbs)Job end
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5A 201HMidland, TX 1,497,00074,539,000 Jul 2
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5C 203HMidland, TX 1,482,00074,648,000 Jul 2
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5D 204HMidland, TX 1,470,00074,609,000 Jul 2
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5B 202HMidland, TX 1,467,00074,658,000 Jul 2
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5J 210HMidland, TX 1,456,000 Jun 13
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5L 212HMidland, TX 1,438,000 Jun 14
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5K 211HMidland, TX 1,431,000 Jun 14
XTO (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5I 209HMidland, TX 1,428,000 Jun 14
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5E 205HMidland, TX 1,408,00083,714,000 Jun 10
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5H 208HMidland, TX 1,400,00081,452,000 Jun 10
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5G 207HMidland, TX 1,399,00081,906,000 Jun 10
Pioneer (ExxonMobil)BUTTERS 5F 206HMidland, TX 1,311,00077,926,000 Jun 10

Where the permits are — the county map book

Every Texas horizontal drilling permit issued in the trailing 365 days that carries a surface location — 3,775 permits across 25 counties, one page each, biggest county first. Each permit is drawn as a line from its surface location toward the permitted bottomhole, so the map shows lateral direction and length, not just a dot; 3,764 of them, 99.71%, resolve to a line (11 fall back to a gray dot where the RRC GIS has no wellbore geometry yet — a targeted re-query found no drilled wellbore for any of them for the fourth week running, so a dot is the correct rendering). Median drawn lateral this issue: 11,225 ft (5th percentile 1,969 ft, 95th 20,602 ft, longest 23,737 ft). Lines are coloured by the county's top-eight permit holders, everyone else gray. Tan lines underneath are Interstate, US and state highways from TxDOT — locational context only, no county boundaries are drawn; all 25 pages carry highway geometry — up from 22 last issue — and 110 route shields are labelled. That change is a source refresh and a correction; see the note below. Permits lead the frac by six to twelve months, so this is a map of where crews will be, not where they are.
⚠ Correction: last issue's highway statement was wrong, and this issue's highway layer is a source refresh. The Aug 31 issue printed that "22 of the 25 pages carry highway geometry" and that "Kent, Sterling and Terry genuinely have no IH/US/SH mainlane inside their frames". That was false. It was an artifact of an incomplete TxDOT publication: the TxDOT Roadways service answered count: 0 to every query on Sep 1, mid-republish, and the geometry we held for those counties was simply missing. The service republished on Sep 1 (2026-09-01 (dataLastEditDate 2026-09-01 15:00:34Z)) and was verified healthy again this morning. Kent in fact carries US 380, US 84, SH 70 and SH 208 in the TxDOT file; Terry carries US 62, US 82, US 380, US 385, SH 137 and SH 214; Sterling carries US 87 and SH 163. What each page draws is the mileage that falls inside its rendered frame, which is not always the whole list: Kent's page shows US 380, SH 208 and SH 70, Terry's US 82, US 385, US 62, US 380, SH 214 and SH 137, and Sterling's SH 163 on its own — Kent's US 84 and Sterling's US 87 fall in the 0.05° fetch pad outside the frame and are fetched but not drawn. All 25 counties were refetched onto the one 2026-09-01 vintage rather than mixing old and new geometry, which took the stored feature count from 230 to 371. No route was lost — every prefix/number pair we held before is still present — and 54 county-route pairs are new. All 25 map pages now carry highways, up from 22. Gaines went from 4 stored features to 14, Mitchell 1 to 9 and Scurry 3 to 14.
⚠ And the permit file behind this book is frozen for a fifth issue. daf804 still ends Aug 7, so the trailing-365-day window is advancing against a static file and the point count has now fallen four weeks running, 3,961 → 3,891 → 3,831 → 3,775 — 56 permits aged out this week and none arrived. That shrinkage is an artifact of the stale file, not a collapse in Texas permitting, and it will repeat every week until the September cut lands. One further currency note on the geometry: the permit surface coordinates are a Sep 1 query of the RRC GIS surface-location layer, reused because this week's permit set is a strict subset of last week's and every API resolved out of cache; the bottomhole lines were queried fresh on Sep 8.
-102.25°-102.00°-101.75°31.75°32.00°I-20US 385SH 158SH 349SH 137SH 191Midland Co., TX567 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysDiamondback (167)Pioneer (167)XTO (47)Chevron (44)Permian Deep Rock (33)Continental (23)Ovintiv (19)Occidental (18)All others (49)
-102.25°-102.00°-101.75°31.25°31.50°US 385US 67SH 329SH 137SH 349Upton Co., TX423 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysPioneer (116)Apache (62)COG (48)FireBird Energy II (44)Summit Petroleum (33)Ovintiv (30)Civitas (28)Chevron (18)All others (44)
-104.00°-103.75°-103.50°-103.25°31.00°31.25°31.50°31.75°32.00°I-20I-10US 285US 62SH 18SH 302Reeves Co., TX416 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysPermian Resources (78)Occidental (57)BPX (44)EOG (28)U S Energy (25)VTX Energy (24)Greenlake Energy (22)Mewbourne (22)All others (116)
-102.25°-102.00°-101.75°32.25°32.50°I-20US 87US 385SH 176SH 349SH 137Martin Co., TX364 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysPioneer (156)Diamondback (82)Ovintiv (72)Occidental (38)COG (9)Apache (4)Hibernia (2)Civitas (1)
-103.75°-103.50°31.75°32.00°US 285SH 302Loving Co., TX358 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysOccidental (107)EOG (48)COG (47)Permian Resources (45)WPX (31)TRP (16)Greenlake Energy (15)XTO (14)All others (35)
-101.75°-101.50°31.75°32.00°I-20US 87SH 158SH 137SH 349SH 163Glasscock Co., TX252 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysPioneer (73)Occidental (52)Diamondback (44)Civitas (26)Double Eagle (DE Central) (19)Unknown (17)Vital Energy (10)Black Swan (8)All others (3)
-101.75°-101.50°31.25°31.50°US 67SH 137SH 163SH 349SH 329Reagan Co., TX236 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysDouble Eagle (DE Central) (108)Pioneer (43)Discovery (26)Permian Resources (15)Hannathon (9)Apache (8)Black Swan (7)Diamondback (5)All others (15)
-102.50°-102.25°32.25°32.50°I-20US 385SH 115SH 176SH 349SH 158Andrews Co., TX182 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysFasken (60)COG (41)Sabalo (22)Occidental (18)Ovintiv (16)Diamondback (12)Apache (5)Elevation (5)All others (3)
-102.50°31.75°32.00°I-20US 385SH 302SH 158SH 349SH 191Ector Co., TX157 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysDiamondback (81)Continental (21)Occidental (16)FireBird Energy II (11)Arrington (10)Mewbourne (5)COG (4)Permian Resources (4)All others (5)
-102.75°-102.50°31.50°I-20US 385SH 329Crane Co., TX142 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysBlackbeard (86)BTA (23)Mewbourne (16)Ring Energy (12)SM Energy (3)Slant (2)
-101.50°-101.25°32.25°32.50°I-20US 87SH 350SH 137SH 176SH 163Howard Co., TX135 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysDiamondback (40)Surge (29)HighPeak (14)Apache (13)Ovintiv (12)Occidental (8)Bayswater (7)Unknown (7)All others (5)
-104.25°-104.00°31.75°32.00°US 285Culberson Co., TX110 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysCimarex (94)Capitan (8)Chevron (8)
-103.25°-103.00°-102.75°-102.50°-102.25°-102.00°30.75°31.00°31.25°I-10US 67US 285US 385US 190SH 349Pecos Co., TX98 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysKinder Morgan (48)Continental (29)Blue Arrow (10)Unknown (5)Mongoose Energy (3)MBX (2)EOG (1)
-103.25°-103.00°31.75°I-20SH 302SH 18SH 115Winkler Co., TX84 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysContinental (36)COG (14)Blackbeard (10)Mewbourne (10)3R (7)WPX (3)Vital Energy (2)Boyd & Mcwilliams (1)All others (1)
-101.25°-101.00°-100.75°31.25°31.50°US 67SH 163SH 137Irion Co., TX67 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysTriple Crown (43)SEM (9)Dallas (8)Hibernia (3)Permian Resources (3)Compass Energy (1)
-103.50°-103.25°-103.00°31.50°I-20US 285SH 115SH 18Ward Co., TX61 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysApache (11)Permian Resources (11)Unknown (8)Manti Tarka Permian (7)Halcon (4)Marathon (4)Vital Energy (4)Iron Orchard (3)All others (9)
-101.75°-101.50°-101.25°32.50°32.75°US 87US 180SH 350Borden Co., TX56 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysHighPeak (20)Surge (19)FireBird Energy II (6)Petroplex Energy (6)Yukon (3)Apache (2)
-102.00°-101.75°32.50°32.75°US 87US 180SH 137SH 349SH 115Dawson Co., TX34 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysPBEX (9)IKE (7)Apache (6)Hibernia (4)Laguna (4)Unknown (3)Burleson (1)
-103.00°-102.75°-102.50°32.75°US 62US 385US 180SH 214SH 83Gaines Co., TX11 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysUnknown (7)Occidental (4)
-101.25°-101.00°32.50°I-20SH 350SH 208SH 163Mitchell Co., TX10 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysBayswater (10)
-101.75°-101.50°-101.25°31.00°US 190SH 137SH 163Crockett Co., TX5 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysSEM (4)Walsh & Watts (1)
-101.00°-100.75°33.25°US 380SH 208SH 70Kent Co., TX2 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysOccidental (2)
-101.00°-100.75°-100.50°32.50°I-20US 84US 180SH 208SH 350Scurry Co., TX2 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysThree Span (2)
-101.25°-101.00°31.50°SH 163Sterling Co., TX2 horizontal permits · trailing 365 daysIKE (2)
-102.75°-102.50°33.25°US 82US 385US 62US 380SH 214SH 137Terry Co., TX1 horizontal permit · trailing 365 daysOccidental (1)