Based in Calgary, David Yager is a former oilfield services executive and the principal of Yager Management Ltd., an oilfield services management consultancy. He has been writing about the upstream oil and gas industry and energy policy and issues since 1979.
How Did Alberta’s Oil Future End Up With Pipeline Companies? How did the value of your house and your future employment opportunities end up in…
The only thing certain about any and all economic forecasts is that they are wrong. I don’t know why and don’t know in which direction,…
It was a memorable phone call. A couple of months ago a classically trained financial engineer with money to invest in distressed oilfield services (OFS)…
The impact of rising oil prices on North American light tight oil (LTO) production is said to be a “Catch 22”, the title of Joseph…
Canada’s oil sands producers in the Fort McMurray region are watching the weather to determine if and when they can move the necessary people back…
Never is a long time. The dictionary definition is, “at no time in the past or future; on no occasion; not ever.” In the volatile…
At some point – hopefully sooner than most think – the price of crude oil and natural gas will rise to levels reflecting full replacement…
Necessity is the mother of invention and in the year ended December 31, 2015, adapting to a rapidly shrinking market was absolutely necessary for oilfield…
“Who will stand up for Alberta’s persecuted billionaire community?” the headline of a popular political blog site sarcastically blared after the story broke last month…
For the thousands of new entrants into the oilfield services (OFS) industry in the past 15 years - both workers and companies – if you…
The numbers are sobering. Make that alarming. According to the folks at ARC Financial Corp. in their March 1 weekly macro-economic overview of Canada’s upstream…
It was yet another depressing headline congruent with the rest of the bad news bombarding the battered Canadian oilpatch for 15 months. On February 22…
The task of abandoning suspended or depleted wellbores and reclaiming the surface location - the modern title of which is well decommissioning (WD) - is…
Your writer is both an oil junkie and a pack rat for information. Nothing major ever collected related to the history of petroleum has hit…
Call it the new era of reverse negatives. It’s not that the Alberta government did something good as much as it didn’t do something bad.…
The Canadian oilpatch is facing unprecedented challenges from uncontrollable forces outside our borders where oil prices and the vast majority of supply and demand are…
There’s an old saying in journalism that goes, “Never let the facts ruin a good story.” This accurately describes what should be called The Incredible…
As the New Year begins, there have been endless prognostications on what will happen to the price of oil and the subsequent impact upon oilfield…
You really know business is tough when success is measured by suffering less than others. But so it goes as the North American oilpatch enters…
If business is good at anything, it is pragmatism. Take a hostile takeover for example. After weeks or months of trading insults and accusations in…