Joints

A buddy of mine that lives along the Oregon coast called the other day to see what I thought about the TV series, Landman, and if the oilfield was "really like that?" He said if it was, we are all a bunch of maniacs.

I hadn't been watching the show so the next day, at lunch for the rig crew and wireline hands, I asked if their wives had been watching and what the ladies thought of it.

They all looked down at their steel toed boots, sort of sheepishly, and started grinning...turns out THEY all watched it, knew every character, every scene and actually starting hollaring at each other about whether Tommy was going to get whacked by the Mexican cartel, was he and Angela sleeping with each other, what was going to catch fire next and lunch ended up like a group therapy session for tough, burly roughnecks totally obsessed with a soap opera... that had drilling rigs in it. The general consensus was they couldn't wait for Season 2.

I phoned in my report to Oregon that evening and confirmed we are all pretty much maniacs.

This joint above I wish I could say was a mainstay in the Fort Worth Basin oilfield for the past 70 years; its not. Its Taylor Sheridan made for his TV show and I guess where Tommy likes to go hang out and drink cold ones.

Its disappointing, I know, that Landman isn't filmed in the Permian. Billy Bob once said in an interview that standing on those caliche pads to film the show was the hottest work he'd ever endured. so being close to a big city, and big AC, is important. Its cooler in Fort Worth by 3/10ths of one degree in July; those caliche pads in Midland County, further west, can be a balmy 120F.

The fake cafe is located on Camp Bowie West Blvd. in Southwest Fort Worth and was a gasoline station, feed store and kitchen top counter outlet before Sheridan got a hold of it and turned it into a joint.

Now the owner of the strip mall where the cafe is, a fellow named, Murrin, is going to turn it into a real cafe, with t-bone steaks and chicken frieds, and everybody within a thousand miles will want to stop in to say that ate at the same joint Tommy Morris hangs out when he's stressed out and needs to eat some ass out on his cell phone.

Once completed then, I am sure, Murrin will lease the new restaurant back to Paramount for shooting the show and make make enough money to buy half of Waco.

The inside of the fake Patch sure looks like my kinda place....

The Patch Cafe is on what use to be a major, trancontiental highway and you could take this highway out of Forth Worth to get to some major oilfields in the Forth Worth Basin long ago.

The Patch was just a few blocks west of the Jenny Lind Club on Camp Bowie Blvd. where in 1938 you could go inside and eat in the dinning room, or sit in your car and get served by the these car hops, called the "stout girls." Not kidding.

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The Forth Worth Basin is 58,000 square miles large. West of the Bend Arch that bifurcates the entire basin is oily and there were some monster oil fields in Eastland, Stephen and Shackleford Counties, like the famous Ranger Field of 1917. Ranger Field, along with Breckenridge Field, together produced nearly 100,000,000 barrels of oil and played a major role in the U.S. and allies efforts in World War I.

West of the Bend Arch in the Basin is home of the famous Barnett Gas Field, where horizontal drilling and hydraulic frac'ing hit the big-time in 2002. George Mitchell had been drilling vertical Barnett (Mississippian, 385MM years old) as early as 1982, started slick-water frac'ing those vertical wells in 1998, then added horizontal laterals to the reciepe in the early 2000's. Really rotten mudstone all of a sudden starting making some gas.

Today there are a little south of 20,000 HZ Barnett wells drilled in the field complex, many of which are located in the Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex, in empty lots, subdivsions, parking lots and even in the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. They are everywhere.

And if you think its easing leasing minerals under homes and condos in a big city like Fort Worth, its actually a nightmare. A landman friend of mine worked up there twenty years ago, put one, 1,100 acre drilling unit together that had 27,000 different owners in it. Took him over a year.

I don't know enough about this shale gas play to render an opinion on economics; the wells quickly beome low volume, low pressure wells that produce a few hundred MCF of gas each day. Some people are still drilling the stuff, even at $1.50 natural gas. Utimate PDP recovery within the complex is believed to be 37 T of gas and 120 MM barrels of oil and condensate, most of the oil coming from the west part of the field.

Mitchell, the Father of putting HZ wells and fracing together, like chocolate and peanut butter, eventually sold his company to Devon.

XTO (Southland Royalty, then Cross Timbers) got its start in 1986 in Forth Worth and it was active in the Fort Worth Basin. It changed its name to XTO in 1993 and started focusing on natural gas. It had large holdings in unconventional tight stuff all over the country, including the Barnett, Fayetteville, Permian and Appalachain Basin. XTO was named to the Fortune 500 list in the early 2000's as one of the fastest growing gas companies in the country, all it took was $11 billion of long term debt.

Rex Tillerson, left, bought XTO in 2010 for $41 B, including every nickle of that $11 B of debt, and today XTO operates as a subsidary of Exxon, including gazillions of wells in the Barnett shale and Marcellus.

I think the guy on the right must be with XTO because he is just smiling so hard his face might break and deep down inside praying Exxon's check clears.

Tillerson bought XTO at something a little south of $6 per MMBTU, with a six month futures strip that was to take gas closer to $7 and success... but in two years the price fell down to below $2. The same time natgas dropped below $2 XTO production had declined like a coconut falling out of a palm tree, Tillerson's compensation package in 2012 was $43B and Exxon shareholders were some mad sumbitches.

To smooth things over with the Board, Rex bought BOPCO's (Bass Brothers) position in the Permian tight oil play in Eddy County, New Mexico in 2017, for $6.6 B. The ink was drying on the assignment when Tillerson left Exxon and vamonosed for Washington to become Trump's Secretary of Energy. Personally I don't think the Eddy County deal was good either and Exxon is just now reaching its 2017 guidance on Eddy County, in 2025. Woods is not the chief cook and bottlewasher at Exxon and is going to take them to the promised land with refracs.

Mr. Tillerson is now trout fishing, I hope, with Mr. Sheffield, who also made a killing selling Exxon gassy shit.