I'm the guy with the white hair who shows up at well sites in a pickup truck that's seen more lease roads than pavement. Formally, I work as a procurement manager for a 150-person E&P operator in the Permian Basin. For the past seven years, I've managed our completions and well services budget — roughly $6 million a year — and tracked every invoice in our cost system. That adds up to around $18 million in documented spend. It isn't the most glamorous job in the oil patch, but it teaches you which costs are real.
Being the designated cost guy also means I field a lot of odd questions. The most common one lately is about basketball: have I seen the Tyrese Haliburton injury video? Different spelling, different sport, and no, I haven't. The second most common is about the dog. People text me, “how much is Simparica at Costco?” I've actually checked. It's cheaper than the vet, but you need a prescription either way, and I don't remember the exact amount. Don't hold me to that number.
That's not why I'm writing this, though. I'm writing because I keep watching operators evaluate Halliburton the same way we did in 2019, and I think it's quietly costing them money. The cheapest per-stage bid in 2025 is rarely the cheapest completed well, and the old assumption that Halliburton is simply the premium-priced option no longer matches what our records show.
The 'Halliburton tax' I used to believe in
Let's be honest about the reputation. For years, Halliburton's name came up in our bid reviews as the safe but expensive option. In the late 2010s, that reputation had teeth. A regional pressure pumping crew could quote a completion 10 to 15 percent below Halliburton and do acceptable work. Not flawless, but acceptable. For an independent operator, that gap is real money. We gave those crews a lot of work.
Then the market changed. The 2020 downturn pushed a lot of small frac capacity out of the business. Some of it never came back. The providers that returned did so with different cost structures — higher equipment prices, tighter margins, and less room in their pricing. Around the same time, Halliburton started rolling out electric frac fleets. I first read about them as an emissions story, honestly. But when I started closing invoices on those jobs, the operational story stood out: fewer diesel-related line items, less maintenance downtime, and a spread that kept pumping. That changes the math even when the day rate looks higher.
By our 2023 re-bid, the pricing spread between Halliburton and the low-cost regional bidder had narrowed to roughly 4 to 6 percent on the jobs that mattered. I'm not citing an industry study; those are our numbers. The old “Halliburton premium” story lives on in conversation, but our spreadsheets stopped agreeing with it a couple of years ago.
The costs that hide inside a lower quote
Here's where I admit a mistake. For my first two years in this seat, I compared bids by dollars per stage. It felt precise. It looked like procurement rigor. But it was incomplete, and I should have known better.
In 2023, we split two similar pads in the same section between Halliburton and a regional crew. The regional quote came in about 7 percent lower. When I closed out both AFEs, the regional crew's wells cost about 4 percent more per completed well. Unplanned downtime was the difference — screen-outs, slower recoveries, extra days on location. None of that appears in the headline price per stage. (Note to self: I still get anchored on a low number when the spreadsheet looks pretty.)
I'm not pretending this was a controlled experiment. Two pads are not a scientific sample, and every geologist in the room will tell you no two wells are identical. But the pattern held across other projects. When I audit our overruns, the causes cluster around non-productive time, not around the original stage price. The cheapest bid usually isn't trying to hide anything; it just doesn't include the risk you're about to buy.
Part of the challenge is that completion designs got more demanding. Longer laterals, higher pump rates, tighter stage spacing — the equipment gets pushed harder every year, and the cost of downtime keeps rising. When you treat every vendor as identical risk and let the lowest price decide, you're ignoring the part of the invoice that actually moves.
Our old policy made this worse. We took the lowest acceptable bid and moved on. In 2022, that policy produced a completion program where the discount disappeared by the time we paid for extra days, re-dress charges, and small line items that only appear when a crew is struggling. The low bid wasn't fake. It just wasn't enough.
Availability became part of the price
There's another change that doesn't show up in any quote: whether the crew actually shows up. In Q2 2024, we were about three weeks from a scheduled completion when a smaller provider told us they might not have a spread available. It wasn't a contract fight. Their equipment and staffing were stretched thinner than their sales team had projected. That kind of news used to be rare. Now it's part of the business.
Halliburton had the capacity to cover the date. Not because they like us — this is procurement, not a friendship — but because their scale gives them more ways to solve scheduling problems. In our cost system, that flexibility doesn't have a line item. It's invisible until the moment you need it. And in that moment, it's worth more than any discount on the original quote.
Where I still push back on Halliburton
I don't want this to read like an advertisement, because it isn't. I still get frustrated with Halliburton's bids on a regular basis. Their line items can be bundled in ways that make apples-to-apples comparison painful. On small workovers with short lead times, a local crew will usually beat them on price and response time. We send those jobs local, and we don't apologize for it.
Granted, the regional crew in our 2023 comparison wasn't a bad company. They weren't trying to trick anyone. Their overhead is lower, and their quote was honest. But overhead isn't the same thing as total cost. I get why operators with tight budgets choose the lower number. Budgets are real. I just can't pretend the risk-adjusted math points the same direction it did in 2019.
What our procurement playbook looks like now
The fundamentals haven't changed. We still want wells completed safely, on time, and at the lowest total cost. What changed is the execution — the technology, the equipment, and the cost drivers that determine whether a project comes in under or over the AFE. What was smart procurement in 2020 is not necessarily smart procurement in 2025. A lot of operators haven't updated that part of their playbook.
Ours looks different now. We get at least three quotes on every major project, and I build a total cost model before we make a decision. When a bid comes in dramatically lower than the others, I don't celebrate. I ask what it leaves out. After nearly $18 million in tracked invoices, the answer is usually not “nothing.”
I don't have all the answers. I've made my share of bad calls, and I'll probably make more. But the rule that has held up better than any other is simple: the lowest number has a way of not being the lowest number. I just wish it applied to vet bills too.