Oil & Gas Upstream

Company-reported oil-equivalent production for 2023 to 2025. Step changes are acquisitions: ConocoPhillips includes Marathon Oil in 2025, EOG includes Encino, Occidental includes CrownRock.

Operating margin for fiscal 2025 across the exploration and production names. Upstream is the segment where margin most closely tracks the commodity price, and the gas-weighted producers separate visibly from the oil-weighted ones.

Six years of revenue for the largest producers. The step changes are acquisitions rather than drilling: this segment consolidated hard, with ConocoPhillips buying Marathon Oil and Diamondback absorbing Endeavor.

Capital expenditure for fiscal 2025. Read this against operating cash flow below: the gap between the two is what funds dividends and buybacks, and keeping that gap wide is the entire capital-discipline thesis.

Cash generated from operations in fiscal 2025, the raw material for both reinvestment and shareholder returns.

Operating cash flow minus capital expenditure for fiscal 2025. The capital-discipline thesis is that this gap stays wide even when prices are decent, because the cash goes to shareholders instead of a new rig fleet.

Industrial production indices for oil and gas extraction and for drilling wells. The divergence is the story of the shale era: output has held up while drilling activity sits far below its 2014 peak, because capital went to shareholders instead of rigs and the wells got more productive.

Where the barrels and the molecules actually come from. The Permian alone produces roughly two thirds of US tight oil, which means the sector's supply growth is a bet on one basin in west Texas and New Mexico. On the gas side the concentration is different: Appalachia's Marcellus and the Haynesville carry the load, and those are the molecules feeding the Gulf Coast export terminals.

EIA tight oil by formation: Permian stacked against every other tight-oil formation in STEO Table 10b. EIA attributes barrels to geologic formations, not to the Permian drilling region used for rig counts, so this share is not identical to a Permian-region share.

Monthly dry gas, billion cubic feet per day, from EIA. Dry gas is what remains after NGLs and impurities are removed: the stream that enters pipelines, power plants, and LNG trains. This is the physical series behind the AI-power and LNG-export demand stories.

Baker Hughes rotary rigs in operation, republished monthly by EIA. A rotary rig is a drilling rig, not a completion crew, so this is the demand signal for drilling services rather than for pressure pumping.

DUC inventory by EIA producing region. A DUC is spare productive capacity that can be brought online faster and cheaper than a new well. When the stack is being drawn down, output can hold while the rig count falls.