Qeshm Island: explosions heard overnight. Mum's the word.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $103.30, but there are reports that WTI has hit $107.10 overnight.
New wells reporting:
- Tuesday, May 19, 2026: 48 for the month, 148 for the quarter, 305 for the year,
- 42030, conf, Kraken, Dwyer East LE 2-36-26 11H,
- 41750, conf, KODA Resources, Stout 1301-1BH,
- 19795, conf, Devon Energy, Johnson 150-99-34-27-1H,
- Monday, May 18, 2026: 45 for the month, 145 for the quarter, 302 for the year,
- 41956, conf, Kraken, Dwyer East 26-35 8H,
RBN Energy: After years of declining interest, the Anadarko is now an M&A hotbed. Link here. Archived.
The prospect of procuring steady-as-she-goes production assets at reasonable prices has been spurring interest in the sprawling Anadarko Basin. In just the past few weeks, two privately held producers closed on deals totaling more than $4 billion, and earlier this month, publicly held Diversified Energy — in partnership with Carlyle Group, the global investment firm — announced an agreement to buy a big set of assets from Camino Natural Resources for nearly $1.2 billion. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the big-money M&A happening in the Anadarko and the drivers behind it.
The 50,000-square-mile Anadarko Basin, which is centered in western Oklahoma but extends into the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, has seen its ups and downs during the Shale Era. Back in the early-to-mid 2010s — after the booms in the Bakken and the Eagle Ford, and before the Permian took (and held) the spotlight — it seemed for a moment that all eyes were on the Anadarko’s SCOOP/STACK (see Figure 1 below; we’ll make brief mention of the adjoining Ardmore Basin in Part 2). Production from horizontal wells in the Anadarko continued rising through 2019, with crude oil output peaking at about 500 Mb/d and natural gas production approaching 7 Bcf/d.
But a combination of the Covid shock and better rock (and economics) elsewhere — especially the Permian — took the wind out of the Anadarko’s sails; so did the determination there was “pressure communication” between the STACK’s Meramec and Woodford formations, complicating development there. (Put simply, pressure communication means that wells in one formation are interfering with the other rather than behaving independently — a bad thing.) E&Ps in the play ratcheted down their Oklahoma capex; production sagged and then plateaued at less-impressive levels: about 300 Mb/d of oil and 5 to 5.5 Bcf/d of gas in recent years.
Figure 1. The Anadarko and Ardmore Basins. Source: RBN
