A THUNDERING HERD
Bison continues acquisitions across OK's oil patch
Oklahoma's Bison is stampeding its way through the oil patch.
The company, created in 2015, started its most recent run at growth in November when it acquired S& S Star Water Solutions, a company that had spent the previous two years building the largest integrated commercial water infrastructure asset in the SCOOP, STACK and Merge plays of the Anadarko Basin.
On Thursday, Bison announced it has acquired Overflow Energy's water infrastructure, permits and development plans that it held in the SCOOP and Merge plays.
In between, it announced in May it had acquired the assets and employees of Cobalt Environmental Solutions, which provided water disposal services in the SCOOP and Merge plays of Oklahoma's Anadarko Basin.
And then on July 11, Bison announced it had entered a 15- year water gathering and disposal agreement with Marathon Oil Co., a subsidiary of Marathon Oil Corp. operating primarily in the Anadarko Basin.
Under terms of that agreement, Bison is exclusively managing all of Marathon's existing and future produced water infrastructure needs within a 5.4- million- acre dedicated area.
Financial details of those deals haven't been disclosed.
And there is no doubt that market forces are making some of its growth possible. But North Whipple, Bison's
CEO, said the company actually is using market forces as an advantage.
“The market condition is challenging for all parties,” Whipple said Thursday.
“But what that means, is, operators need water solutions companies that can scale up their infrastructure in such a way that it saves those operators money so that they can continue to lower their costs as they develop their acreages. That really is what it is all about.”
Whipple noted the latest acquisition will allow Bison to build on what it already has developed and recently acquired.
More importantly, he said, the Overflow Energy acquisition establishes Bison as the only water midstream business with large scale, integrated water infrastructure in the SCOOP and Merge plays.
"We are clearly committed to the region, our customers and the goal of comprehensively lowering the industry's water costs,” Whipple said.
He added, however, that a reliable midstream system also requires redundancies, optionality and best-inclass service, all of which he said Bison has worked to achieve through its growth the last half year.
Bison owns and operates more than 35 commercial water disposal facilities, has more than 200 miles of interconnected water-gathering pipelines in the SCOOP, Merge and STACK plays and is expected to soon meet the goal of having more than 1.2 million barrels per day of permitted disposal capacity.
“We have put in a lot of pipe and other infrastructure organically,” Whipple said.
Outside of moving, recycling and disposing of produced water, Bison also provides hauling services for oil- field equipment and materials, the construction of midstream gathering and transport pipelines and processing facilities.
The company employs about 1,000 workers operating out of about a dozen yards across the state.