ProPetro Holding Corp. (NYSE:PUMP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Sam Sledge: Yeah, great question. You’re exactly right. There’s been quite a bit of consolidation in the E&P space this year, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it continues in the next year at almost a similar pace. I think if you look back historically, it’s safe to say that most of us having grown up here and been in the oilfield service industry for a while now. Big consolidation like that for the oilfield service space might have been scary and created some uncertainty. But if you look at it through the industrialization that we keep talking about and how ProPetro is positioned within that, I can confidently say I think we welcome it. I think everyone on our team does knowing the quality of service we provide with the technology that we bring and the commercial architecture that we bring to the party and how it positions us with the larger operators that are making these acquisitions, doing these mergers with more of a long-term tilt to their kind of planning and mindset.

And that really to us plays exactly to our model. So it’s always interesting to see who it is and how it plays out. But overall I think we feel really well about how we’re positioned within kind of that changing.

Arun Jayaram: Great. And just a follow-up, Sam, I was wondering if you could maybe help us quantify or think about the magnitude of frac efficiency gains that ProPetro has been able to deliver over time, I’d love to hear about maybe hours pumped per fleet on a monthly basis. Just to maybe allow us to think about the impact of those efficiency gains on future demand, you characterize this and we agree with this as a low to no growth operating environment with E&P focused on efficiency gains. And maybe the question is you mentioned that you employ a very sophisticated pricing model. How do you adapt that pricing model to take advantage of – if you deliver strong efficiency gains where you can get paid for that efficiency gains and value delivered to the E&P?

Sam Sledge: I think the last part of that question is really important. It’s a great question. And look some of that gets into kind of competitive things from a pricing standpoint. But I can tell you we’re very interested in making a return on the amount of assets we deploy and how hard we work with them. Those are some of the main drivers in how we think about pricing and returns. And look when I find myself talking about efficiencies, I think, I probably have this conversation with you Arun. It’s kind of fun to look back to prior peak like 2019 and you look at what we were doing then. And if we had a fleet that was continually pumping say 15 hours a day on a regular basis that fleet was highly celebrated. Now it’s why isn’t every fleet pumping over 20 hours a day.

That’s kind of how we look at our portfolio and we know that we have competitors that might look at it similarly. That’s kind of the general bar water mark right now. But as you look at our daily operational metrics it’s not uncommon to have a single fleet pump over 23 hours for multiple days at a time. So you get to a point where there’s only 24 hours in a day. So the engineering upstream of us as it pertains to things like simul-frac and all the different ways you can complete a pad probably is part of the next frontier that is a much longer transition and maybe as a part of bigger broader E&P consolidation I don’t know but we’ll see. But the surface efficiencies and what we’re doing what our team is doing at the well site is really just unbelievable.