Is This More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About FracFocus? November 14, 2022

 Link here.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to filter the data down to eight counties in West Texas’s Permian Basin (Andrews, Borden, Crane, Dawson, Ector, Eddy, Gaines, and Glasscock), for the operator XTO (the onshore unconventionals spin-off of Exxon).

42,850 rows of a data are returned when I apply the filter. Obviously, XTO is a fairly active operator in the Permian Basin. 

Next, I want to visualize how much water XTO pumps during each of its completions over time. 

So what does the above plot tell us? Mainly, that over time XTO has become more aggressive in the amount of water it pumped in each of its fracs, increasing its largest fracs from from less than 5 million gallons per frac pumped in 2014, to over 25 million gallons per frac in 2018-2019. 

Non-water liquid?

There is less of a clear cut trend here. With the exception of one massive outlier in mid-2019, the data looks to be fairly constant.

Looking at the box-and-whisker plot above, it looks like the average frac has about 12,000 gallons of non-water additives, with a skewed upward distribution. 

One of the more interesting facets of this data set is the vendor information, from which we can glean all sort of interesting insights. For example, from whom does XTO buy its chemicals and frac sand for its completions? Did the company switch preferred vendors over time? 

We can glean a few insights from the above graph: 

• It looks like XTO switched to heavily using P3 as a preferred vendor around Q2 of 2018. In Q1, P3 wasn’t used at all. 
• Throughout 2018, XTO consistently relied on the following vendors when purchasing products: Ace, Chemplex, Finoric, Nalco, and Sandtrol. 
• It looks like Universal Pressure Pumping was trialed as a completions vendor in Q2 of 2018. However, it was not used before or after Q2, so it was likely not picked up as a preferred vendor within the geographic location that the data is filtered by. 

Although the bar chart above is limited by time and geographic location, it still offers a snapshot into XTO’s completions and vendor strategy. With this information, O&G companies can gather important vendor insights that may help them to plan completions in the future.