Your LOE has a floor. You have never seen it.
Peers tell you your rank, never your floor. Should-cost is the floor: the theoretical bottom of every operating line. We built it starting with compression, your biggest lever on both cost and runtime, and we run the read as a retained seat through The OPEX Desk.
Grading on a curve is not a cost strategy.
Peer benchmarking answers one question: where you sit in a distribution of other operators' spending. If the whole basin overpays for compression, ranking second quartile means you overpay slightly less than most. It is grading on a curve, and everyone on the curve shops at the same three stores. The barometer that matters is the floor, what the line should cost, built up from your vendors' own economics. The gap between your spend and that floor is money you can recover, which is more than can be said for your quartile rank.
The same fix pays you twice
Compression is a large cost line, so attacking it moves the LOE numerator directly. It is also the biggest driver of runtime and uptime, so it moves production, the denominator of LOE per BOE, at the same time. (The production denominator, to be precise. The market denominator, installed horsepower per basin, is a different number and lives in the Denominator Report.) A line that pulls both ends of the ratio is where a should-cost program starts, because the same fix pays you twice.
See the method →"We saw both bottom-line cost improvements and run-time stability gains, which translated into more predictable production and stronger cash flows. The vendor structures Kalibr brought us were better than we anticipated and gave us greater confidence going forward."
Both numbers are documented engagement results, not projections: more than $150M in value delivered across client work, and roughly 25% average cost reduction on compression specifically. Jonah Energy and Anschutz are the anchor names behind them, and either will tell you the same thing we will: the floor was lower than anyone in the room expected.
A price taker with a fragmented fleet and proposals 13 to 15% above benchmark. Outcome: 12.5% cost reduction worth $1.3MM/yr, uptime guarantees with automatic credits, DEMOB and MOB absorbed.
Read the Ledger →Operators put market data in G&A and then wonder why the subscription feels expensive. That is the wrong ledger. Under COPAS guidance, consulting and technical services directly allocable to producing properties are chargeable to those properties' operating cost centers, and work tied to well construction capitalizes into the AFE under ASC 932. Our clients allocate the census and the Desk across the wells the work supports, which changes the arithmetic completely: across a thousand producing wells, the per-well-per-month figure is a decimal on the lease operating statement, not a line your CFO defends at budget season. Your accountants make the call, and we will hand them the memo.
The invisible 74% of the installed base is operator-owned, which means operators hold the exact rows the census was built to find. Contribute your owned-fleet roster and the gap closes where it matters: coverage improves, your subscription price drops by the contribution credit, and your own fleet comes back benchmarked against the market as part of the read. Same census, same terms as every other buyer; contribution never buys early access or private data.
The retained version of everything on this page.
A seat, not a project: a vendor pushes a cost increase on any operating line and the Desk attacks it against the floor; you want a custom spend view or an agent running on your own data and the Desk builds it. We usually know your vendor exposure from the census before the first call, which makes the first call unusually short.
Talk to The OPEX Desk