Fracking Firms Face New Crop Of Competitors

The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

So many companies have jumped into the hydraulic-fracturing business that the price of performing the key part of the oil- and gas-drilling technique has plunged in recent years, forcing fracking's pioneers to play up new technologies to stand out.

Schlumberger Ltd., Halliburton Co. and BJ Services, a company that is now a subsidiary of Baker Hughes Inc., once did nearly all the hydraulic-fracturing work in the U.S., helping energy companies unlock previously unreachable oil and natural gas in shale formations and ushering in a boom in domestic energy production.

But their profits attracted competition and spurred the construction of new fracking fleets by independent companies. Now their share of the market for pressure pumping—the main step in the fracking process, in which water and other materials are injected into a well to break apart rock formations and unleash oil or gas—has dropped off as smaller, cheaper competitors have proved they could do similar work. 

Before my site was hacked, and I had to re-load, the #1 page on the MDW was "Top Ten Fracking Companies in The Bakken." It is interesting that it took this long for a story on fracking companies to be reported in The WSJ. Regular readers noted the phenomenon two years ago.