Each Friday in the last month of each quarter, we pass our keyboard to an Infill Thinking member to weigh in from their field. We hope you enjoy reading these hand-picked contributions as much as we do.
Guest Contributor Introduction From Joseph Triepke:
I recently received an insightful email from long-time Infill Thinking member Rasool Mohammad. In our subsequent offline conversation about market price vs. effective price for frac sand, Rasool proposed writing a guest post to share his perspective on the frac sand market with Infill Thinking readers.
Rasool has had a front row seat to the ebbs, flows, and structural changes in the frac sand industry over the past five to ten years. Most readers probably know him best for his role as Founder, COO, and President of Select Sands Corp (he was with the company from 2011 through summer 2019), where he led successful efforts to commercialize a NWS deposit in Arkansas. But Rasool’s history in hard rock mining dates back long before frac sand to his university education in Pakistan in the late-1980s/early-1990s (degree in mining engineering) and his entrepreneurial efforts in precious metal and gem mining in Canada in the early-2000s.
I’m glad that Rasool offered to write in with his opinions on the state of frac sand, because the resulting post is an extremely candid, no-holds-barred op-ed from a miner who was a NWS apologist until recently. Rasool believes the market is moving in new ways and won’t look back. While his “adapt fast or go away” message may not be popular with all readers (and would have been shockingly controversial two years ago), my guess is that most folks reading this have likely come to similar realizations given the dramatic changes we’ve seen in this completions market niche. Here’s how Rasool articulates the frac sand story…
Northern White Sand’s Rags To Riches To Rags Story…
Rasool Mohammad
December 27, 2019
The oilfield industry has many similarities to sports. Both are cyclical. Both have lots of turnover in winning strategies and players. Both have their fair share of larger than life characters and dynastic franchises. And a continual evolution of best practices in both sports and the oilfield is fueled by the players’ insatiable quest for excellence and optimization of the details.
In the case of well completions and frac sand, I find that hockey offers a relevant industry parallel from the sports world. Hockey is a sport invented by the Canadians but later perfected by the Americans. Similarly, the Northern White Sand (NWS) industry didn’t invent fracing, but they came along and perfected it. At least that’s what everyone believed until a few short years ago when capital discipline became paramount in US unconventional E&P.
The perception that NWS has perfected completions has changed quite a bit as of late. Like sports, winning strategies change fast in completions. All Infill Thinking members are surely familiar with the market story echoed on the latest earnings calls of US Silica, Hi Crush, and Covia – many millions of tons of NWS they have idled, displaced by cheap, lower quality local sand.
Having ridden the NWS wave up and down, I wanted to write in and share my personal journey, a few observations about the state of the frac sand market, and a couple thoughts on where things may go from here (including a personal mea culpa).
From The Arctic To Houston
Before I look into what my crystal ball says, let me share a little bit about how I got into the frac sand business.
My career path began in hard rock mining – mostly working above the arctic circle in the Canadian Arctic. Long before I had ever heard of frac sand, I was preoccupied with mining efforts targeting diamonds, gold, and uranium.
Early on, I got the itch to start my own business and did so by making a gold discovery in Canada, raising over $5mm of capital, and putting most of that money into the drill bit (drilled defined 400,000 Oz of Au). When we were down to the last $1mm, I realized that investors were not going to fund further early stage gold projects and the gold business became a dead end. It’s a different story now for gold, but I’m here to talk about frac sand not gold.
So how does a precious stones and metals miner get into frac sand? Well, I was at the Denver Gold Show in 2013 and met some folks there from Canada who were pitching a frac sand deal. That was the start of my foray into the world of frac sand. I started looking into the frac sand business first at home, by investing in a small frac sand quarry in Canada. Then I took a call from an Arkansas gentleman named Renny Propst, who pitched me a frac sand mine investment in Arkansas.
Renny, together with his brothers Jimmy and Paul, have been active in real estate ownership, management, and commercial leasing. In the early 1970’s, they assumed management of a family-owned limestone quarry lease on land. The brothers supervised the negotiations of subsequent quarry leases, and expanded their business endeavors to include heavy equipment construction and a multi-faceted helicopter operation.
That call from Renny got me involved in an effort to acquire a brown sand mine in Arkansas and convert it into a NWS mine. I raised over $15mm to fund the effort. Our timing, the fine mesh nature of the high quality NWS deposit, and our proximity advantage to demand vs. NWS in WI, MN, and IL fortuitously coincided with a big demand shift in the industry: the switch from coarse sand to fine sand in completion designs. Fine mesh sand pushed coarse out of the market significantly between 2013 and 2017 as this chart illustrates.
Source: NavPort October 2016
As we have all swapped coarse sand price stories, and how high it was, over a beer(s): I was on the record among the first promoters, from Vancouver (pun intended), of finer mesh sands. When the market adopted finer mesh sands as I had hoped, my little company reached a $100mm valuation. Things were good. I thank Nick and David Steele for introducing me to the landowner (Steve Stauffer), where I drilled 42MM tons of NWS sand resources in AR, having started my NWS quarry there.
The Easy Money Days For NWS Ended With The Capital Discipline Trend And The Ensuing Shift To Local Sand Mines, Which Popped Up In Droves
During the oil market collapse in late-2014 and early-2015, the quest for cheaper completion methods compelled most E&P that hadn’t looked at slick water completion methods to do so, further fueling the boom in fine mesh sand demand.
We made good money with our Arkansas mine, even in downcycle, because of the switch to fines. And we were well positioned when demand came roaring back in 2016/2017. I sold NWS sand mined in Arkansas for $70/ton FOB mine in 2017.
Then I started reading about “Capital Efficiency” in my morning notes and how tight oil ROIs weren’t on par with other industries. Wall Street had begun clamoring for capital discipline in E&P.
This is how I look at the capital discipline trend: the funny money (i.e. quantitative easing) made its way to the unconventional drill bit, encouraging O&G companies to become growth / well factories. Then in a 180 degree shift on Wall Street, the O&G industry was suddenly told ‘you are just growing for growth’s sake’ and ‘you are irresponsible stewards of capital’ and ‘where’s your sense of capital discipline?’
Let us not forget who was throwing money at us (as an industry) to grow in the first place. It was the same guys who suddenly woke up one morning in 2016/2017 and decided to demand capital discipline from the industry they used to reward for growth. The same guys who wanted (and funded) the O&G industry’s growth in the prior cycle were now singing a different tune: ‘oh by the way, you are wrong to do what I asked you to do… why aren’t you acting like any other business with capital discipline?’
Anyhow, the industry listened to these calls for austerity in the capital markets. I believe the about face on Wall Street was the primary catalyst for the adoption (and proliferation) of local brown sand, which effectively ended the easy money days for NWS.
Local sand’s relatively low up-front cost (due to its freight spread advantage) fits hand-in-glove with the ‘capital discipline’ trend sweeping across the O&G industry, even if EUR suffers in the long-run. And so… what happened? The local sand mines appeared in droves, playing right into changes in customer behavior designed to show capital discipline to investors by slashing completion costs. And they overbuilt, structurally depressing the price of frac sand.
Twice Is A Coincidence, Three Times Is A Pattern
Unconventional oil is a relatively new industry. And it’s a new industry in the United States! That’s an explosive mix, where innovations happen overnight.
As the new US industry that it is, new technology will be adopted, perfected and there will be no going back. We’ve seen examples in the past that lead me to believe the local sand shift will permanently curtail NWS demand.
Like we saw the shift from coarser sands to finer (and there was no going back). Like we saw the change to slickwater from gel fracs (and there was no going back). We are now seeing the change from NWS sand to brown local (and I believe there will be no going back).
This shift, driven by the capital discipline trend mentioned above, has caused a supply proliferation that has structurally depressed pricing for frac sand. The multi-year downtrend is illustrated by this PPI data.
Producer Price Index: Hydraulic Fracturing Sand
Source: St. Louis Fed
Unconventional oil development is a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ business. When a technology change happens, money and resources and brain power are thrown at the new concept to perfect it and the herd of customers rapidly adopts it not be outdone by competitors producing the same commoditized end product (hydrocarbon molecules).
That’s why there is ‘no going back’ mentality in the world of hydraulic fracturing. Sorry NWS guys and gals!!
A Triple Whammy…
The resulting changes described above, which I don’t see any ‘going back from’, have created a triple whammy for the NWS supply base:
- With the shift to brown sand, lower NWS volumes are required
- Prices for frac sand are lower across the board amid oversupply due to local mine proliferation
- Many NWS deposits are a mix of 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3 of coarse sand, medium sand finer sands; so the shift in material demanded (trending towards 100 mesh) has lowered the effective price per ton mined
I believe the first two factors in this triple whammy are pretty well documented and widely understood. So let me take a minute here to explain the logic of the third in a bit more detail.
Let’s take for example a NWS mine that produces about 50% 100 mesh and 50% 4070 mesh as its output. If the mine sells only one product and not the other because market demand has shifted in favor of one product or because other sources with location advantages now supply one of the products, then effective price realized will fall below market prices quoted due to waste product. Remember, you can’t change what the mine quarry gives you in terms of gradation, so you have to process material the mine produces that the market might not want.
So back to our 50:50 mine that is producing 100 mesh and 40/70… here is what the effective price per ton mined will be assuming the mine-gate price of NWS frac sand is in the mid teens and the mine can only place one of their two grades produced (I used a mid-teens pride assumption based on a datapoint from a Simmons Energy Industry Note from December 18, 2019).
0.5 x $15 + 0.5 x $0 = $7.5/ton
If we plug in $20 per ton for market price instead of $15 above, the effective price becomes $10 per ton. The point is, when you hear about leading edge ‘mine-gate’ or ‘FOB mine’ prices for frac sand, that’s not the actual effective price on every ton mined and processed for many NWS mines. And opex/ton mined doesn’t go away just because the product isn’t demanded in the market. The quoted prices are higher than effective realized prices (which in some cases are at or below cost) because of differences in deposit mix and demand mix, and the waste product that results when mines are unable to sell balance of quarry.
This is one of the key reasons that some top names, who are otherwise extremely efficient producers, have curtailed production (ranging from cutting shifts to outright closures) across some 80mmtpa of frac sand mine nameplate capacity in 2018 and 2019 according to Infill Thinking data. Yet even still the 2020 market is oversupplied by over 50% as per Infill Thinking estimates.
I know the NWS producers are now mostly engaging in a “buying time” strategy, but selling just one product and hoping that the market will turn around simply won’t work. Some of the stockpile of what sand suppliers identify in their financials and SEC filings as “WIP” (Work in Progress) can be easily seen from satellites. And these stockpiles are growing.
It won’t be long until we will hear about another write-off of inventories. And another. And another. There’s even some talk in the market now about new mini-mobile mines of 1mm tons per year or less, which can chase well pads and which just might be the next disruptive trend in supply.
I heard one small NWS producer saying humorously recently that he’d be better off opening a barber shop in his office tower instead of an NWS office because hairstyles don’t change as much as E&P completion technologies (and haircuts have better margins right now than their run of mine).
Lessons Learned And A Mea Culpa
The frac sand business, in my opinion, is not a ‘survival of the fittest’ business. Instead it is a ‘survival of who can adapt the fastest’ business.
We saw how the industry shifted at light speed from NWS to regional brown and then local sand. Those who made the switch sooner than others have flourished and gained market share.
Just like the name of our end market, ‘unconventional oil’, so too is the frac sand business model anything but conventional.
The reason so many will fail, and are failing, in the frac sand business today is that conventional thinking (sticking with your knitting) doesn’t work here. The ‘shiny object’ model is what does work, in my opinion.
Look at all those who said NWS will never go away (and I was one of them – there’s my mea culpa). We hung our hat on the EURs, sphericity, roundness, crush, NTU, and all that jazz that NWS had to offer. Never-the-less, the shift did happen to brown local sand from NWS despite the laundry list of qualities that NWS has to deliver perfection in well completions.
The trend in the future will likely be towards 700k- 1mm tons per year local / in-basin sand mines that can be set up very close to a customer’s well completions within 75-mile radius or less. The customers will prefer these smaller localized frac sand plants because of the surety of supply in close proximity to the well site – which will reduce last mile costs and wait times.
The multi-million TPA local/in-basin mine model where customers’ trucks wait on pick ups and travel as much as 100 miles or more to well locations still has inefficiencies that a new crop of smaller plants may be able to wipe out.
Rasool can be reached via email: rasoolm@telus.net
https://www.infillthinking.com/infill-thoughts/northern-white-sands-rags-to-riches-to-rags-story-guest-post/