Getting a Line on Wireline

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Change comes to every sector of the oilfield, working its way through the various niches. Sometimes it comes by technological advance, sometimes by economic realities asserting themselves, sometimes by scarcity—or abundance—of resources. And sometimes it comes from ripple effects of mergers, acquisitions, and other consolidation activity. Perhaps all four are at work today in the wireline industry in the Permian Basin, but certainly the fourth factor—consolidation—is making itself felt.

It’s been a momentous 2025 for the wireline niche. Actually, it was in late 2024 that the wireline sector witnessed a big move, when Axis Energy Services merged with Brigade Energy Services to create what the combined company—Dallas-based Axis Energy Services LLC—described as the largest well servicing company in America. Granted, this is well services, not wireline, and well servicing as a sector greatly outweighs wireline. Still, the step was significant in wireline circles, for the transaction brought 26 wireline trucks and crews into the Axis fold.

April brought two big moves. On April 1, Atlanta, Ga.-based RPC Inc. acquired Pintail Alternative Energy, aka Pintail Completions, aka Pintail Wireline. The price? $245 million. Pintail is headquartered in Midland and is a leading provider of wireline services in the Permian Basin. Its 30 active fleets include both conventional and electric wireline units, and these feature hardware and technology that is among the newest in the industry. Pintail’s 2024 revenues topped more than $400 million. If nothing else, the transaction establishes continued strong interest in wireline’s future in the Basin.

On the vendor/supplier side, Houston-based Vertice Oil Tools acquired Greenwell Engineering Inc. on April 15. Vertice management said that the acquisition enhances Vertices’ ability “to support wireline service providers and E&P companies with innovative tools and integrated solutions, and broadens its presence across unconventional oil and gas markets.” Greenwell expects to “bring an expanded pipeline of new wireline and completion technologies to market.”

Now let’s flash back to 2023, when Patterson-UTI took a huge step to make itself a major player in the oilfield services world when it acquired NexTier Completion Services. This gave Patterson-UTI the biggest wireline fleet in the nation. NexTier’s management says they are using advanced electric drive equipment, along with automation-enabled pumpdown technology to streamline service operations during well completions. Their electric units feature a digitized winch run by software, a rotating drum base, and backup diesel power. The units’ electrical power needs can be fed by an in-field electrical source.

Meanwhile, acquirer Patterson-UTI now is worth a hefty $5 billion-plus.

The stakes keep increasing, and it’s clear that technology and refinement are key selling points in this wireline market.

So much for major moves. Now let’s consider the trends in the day-to-day work in the patch. And how are wireline service providers holding up, or hanging on, or even gaining ground? We talked to two successful operations—one an independent (Midland-based Underdog Wireline) and the other a division within a larger entity (Liberty Energy’s Midland-based wireline unit serving the Permian Basin).

Justin Esquibel is owner/operator of Underdog Wireline, a business he owns with his wife and his wife’s parents. The family also operates Underdog Rentals.

Esquibel, speaking about changes in his field, said that the biggest trend is “optimizing. Getting a lot more efficient.” He said that operators are going to simops [simultaneous operations], frac’ing two wells at a time, and looking at going to three simul-fracs, using three wireline crews at the same time.

“Right now, there are anywhere from four to six wells per pad,” Esquibel said. “And we even see up to eight to 10 wells per pad. When you get to the eight-to-10 well pads, you actually have two frac crews operating, or possibly one frac crew and two wireline trucks. So you can be running in two wells at a time, perforating, and they [the pressure pumping crew] could be frac’ing two wells at the same time. There are a lot of moving parts.”

And the stakes are high. Said Esquibel: “If you encounter downtime, the costs could get into hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Esquibel, with his family, bootstrapped Underdog Wireline in 2018. Some eight years earlier, his in-laws and wife had started a business called Underdog Rentals. “It was [is] a shower trailer business. Emergency shower trailers for the fracs,” Esquibel says. “Today they have cool down trailers, pickup machines, laydown machines, torque and test.”

When Justin entered the picture, he had 12 years’ experience already in wireline work. “We pretty much took our life savings and started the wireline side,” he say. “It was one truck, one crane, one pressure control [equipment], and me and my father-in-law and one operator. We started off logging for Diamondback Energy. We’ve been working with them all this time.”

Asked to describe what’s good about working for Diamondback, Esquibel said it is the consistency of work they provide. “Plus, they’re willing to understand and to take a chance on independent guys.”

Other large customers today for Underdog include Fasken Oil and Ranch and Hibernia. “With Fasken Oil and Ranch, same thing—they’re a family owned company like we are,” Esquibel says. “I was actually their wireline engineer back in 2014, so I’ve done their vertical work. Now Underdog has worked with them since 2019.”

As for Hibernia, “We’ve just started working with those guys.”

Underdog runs 11 trucks. They currently have 46 employees. “Actually, we need to add more equipment,” Esquibel says. “I’m forecasting that [between] this year and next, as long as prices stay decent, we’ll add probably another five trucks. So we could potentially be up to about 60 to 70 employees.”

They do cased hole work, both vertical and horizontal production. They do plug-and-perf jobs as well, with that [frac-related] work occupying about 40 percent of their time. The other 60 percent is well logging, toe preps, and workover and production work.

A toe prep is a preliminary job on a new wellbore that is soon to be frac’d. The toe is the extreme end of the lateral, and it is worked differently than the “stage work” that occupies the bulk of the perforating and frac’ing activity.

“Some customers require radial cement bond logs,” Esquibel says. “So we’ll go in, we’ll run a junk basket, then we’ll log it, and then we’ll perforate the first stage.”

The junk basket/gauge ring run employs a tool (the junk basket) with a ring attached to the tool that is “almost drift of the casing.” In other words, almost as big as the inside diameter of the casing pipe. This ensures that there is adequate room for the frac job that will follow. “We’ll run that down to make sure that the wellbore is clean.” The junk basket collects all the “junk” for retrieval to the surface.

Underdog is doing a lot of work in the Delaware Basin, especially in the New Mexico portion.

They do toe preps for Diamondback, and pumpdown (plug and perf) work, also called stage work, for Fasken Oil and Ranch and also Hibernia.

Consolidation affects them, as it does everyone else in the patch.

“Primarily you’re seeing a lot of the bigger operators gobble up a lot of the smaller operators, and you’ve just got to make sure you’re on the right side of the buyout to make sure you continue working,” Esquibel says. “We’ve seen a lot of these independent companies get gobbled up by the bigger guys. And then sometimes the guys that were working for the independents [that is, for the smaller entity in the buyout] kind of get shunned and miss out on the work.”

Another requirement today is being super-competitive on pricing.

Esquibel says he is seeing “a little bit” of implementation of tariffs. “Some of our manufacturers are implementing tariffs on us. On our expendables, like our [perforating] guns. They’re charging us a 7 percent tariff on top of the price that we were already paying. And so now we’re having to go to the operator to see if they will let us pass on the cost. Sometimes you have to eat the cost. You’re trying to ‘make do’ until the tariffs are done.”

Meanwhile, over at Liberty Energy‘s wireline operations in Midland, district manager Beau Livingston cites automation as a decisive factor in the wireline industry’s present and future.

“Everyone is trying to focus on more and more automation,” says Livingston, who has been with Liberty for about five years, having come there from a wireline role at SLB. His district runs eight trucks—soon to be nine—out of their yard.

Livingston said that the automation push is the trend not just for the wireline sector but for the well completion industry in general. “That’s the way that every industry is going,” he said. “The move is to more and more technology integration to take some of those decisions and error-prone situations out of the hands of people. That’s certainly something that I can see in the next five years that’s just going to take off. Pretty much the first person who gets it down pat and takes that human error element out of it—well, that’s going to be a huge deal.”

It’s happening with companies besides just Liberty Energy and its clients. In the first quarter of 2025, Halliburton and Coterra Energy announced the launch of an autonomous hydraulic fracturing technology in North America with their Octiv Auto Frac service. This technology automates stage delivery execution with the push of a button. Coterra has stated they are the first operator to fully automate and control their hydraulic fracturing design and execution.

But as for Liberty, another push they have is to work more electric-powered trucks into their fleet. “We have a mix of standard, hydraulic units, plus some hybrid electric units, where you have the opportunity to switch back and forth between either electric or hydraulic. And then lately, we’ve really been digging into all-electric units that are [accompanied by] an auxiliary diesel generator or some other kind of power supply. This is driven the demands and the push from the clients. They want to be able to say that they’re as green as they can be.”

Liberty’s Midland yard does work for, among others, Occidental Petroleum, XTO (ExxonMobil), Discovery Natural Resources, Kaiser Francis Exploration,  Petro-Hunt LLC (Tulsa based), Tap Rock Resources (out of Colorado. active in the Delaware), and Civitas.

Pumpdown stage work is their main focus. “We don’t really push too much into the day work, the plugs-and-packers side. We focus pretty much solely on the pumpdown perforating side.”

Liberty’s wireline teams are deployed with Liberty Energy well completion units. Frac spreads. “We only work ‘red on red,’” Livingston says, referring to the company’s trademark color.

Another trend Livingston is seeing is a move toward using, or re-using, materials that are currently already in the field. “And by that I mean if they have residual sand from some sort of operation that they’re working on, or residual products from petroleum refining, like pet coke [used as proppant], they’ll try to incorporate that into the frac,” he says. “They’ll frac with proppant that they source from a process that the client maybe already has undergoing. Also, a big push is that we’re reusing produced fluids quite a bit these days instead of trucking in additional fresh water.”

And it’s all just going constantly. Constant activity.

“It’s continuous frac’ing—so they want wireline running constantly,” Livingston says, echoing what Esquibel said about Underdog’s perf work. “They want frac constantly pumping.”

Livingston’s teams use on average a 10-gun string on their perf runs, with three to six perforating clusters in each of those guns. He says there has been a trend toward using larger charges but fewer charges.

“From what I understand on the frac side, it helps with their frac uniformity,” he says. “I believe the amount of water and sand they can get into each perforation is obviously a little greater whenever the hole is bigger, so I think they’re aiming for fewer holes, but the holes that are there are larger, more consistent, and there’s less friction whenever you’re trying to put everything downhole.”

Like Underdog, Liberty does more work in the Delaware Basin, and in the New Mexico portion, then they do closer to Midland.

The Delaware wells are deep, of course. “The depth varies, but lately we’ve been going into deeper and deeper wells. Next week we’re going into a well with a total depth of 33,500 feet, so that’s pretty deep. That’s TD, including the horizontal. I believe it’s around 12,000 to 13,000 total vertical depth.”

Liberty wireline crews generally are employed about two to three weeks on a particular wellpad.

All the perf work has made hiring a relatively simple, easy matter, Livingston asserts. “I’ll be honest, hiring has never been an issue for our particular group, and I would imagine it’s pretty similar on the frac side [at Liberty] as well. Our schedule is just really, really attractive to a lot of people, especially the exact people that we would want to attract, which would be seasoned guys in the oil field who’ve been there, and who have worked the crazy schedules. The ones who have all the experience, but who are looking to kind of settle in and work something more consistent with a better work/life balance. We do two weeks on, two weeks off. Anytime I’ve ever reached out and been hiring, I’ve never had a problem finding qualified candidates that want to come to Liberty.”

Automation, consolidation, innovation, electrification, and optimization. Change comes to every sector of the oilfield, and it has come to wireline as well.

Jesse Mullins, Editor

Jesse Mullins is editor of Permian Basin Oil and Gas Magazine, a role he has filled since 2011. Prior to his O&G journalism career he was editor-in-chief of a consumer magazine called American Cowboy. He can be reached at [email protected].

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