“If you don’t have your crews lined up by now, you’re not going to be able to complete your wells in Q1,” replied my oilfield service friend. “We’re fully booked into the New Year,” he nodded, anecdotally confirming the trends I was starting to sense. Back at the office, my line charts for Canadian upstream spending and oilfield activity were finally reversing, poking up through the lowest grid lines in the spreadsheet. And all this was happening before the OPEC-ites pushed oil prices into the low end of the $US50/B range last week. Two Canadian pipeline approvals also pumped more positively charged ions into the industry’s mood. But I’m wondering what’s going on? If the first quarter is already booked up for some vital oilfield services, what does the rest of 2017 look like? Could the next page flip of the calendar put the worst two years […]