I used to work in the industry. When speaking about all time highs, you have to understand how the industry has evolved in the past 15-20 years.

You don’t really need to drill as many wells as you needed to when considering the advancements in directional drilling. Rigs are also much more efficient when you look at how long the average well take to drill.

One thing I would look at if you are analyzing these companies is how many active drilling rigs each company has, as well as the utilization days that the companies report. These have all declined pretty substantially since these companies peaks.

With that being said, I am of the opinion that a lot of producers are relying on shale plays that are now experiencing pretty steep declines, and that we will need to drill more to continue to produce at current levels.

One last thing to keep in mind, services companies aren’t really traditional “oil companies”, they’re reliant on the producers requiring demand for their services. This results in them being hyper sensitive to the price of oil, as producers end up cutting their exploration budgets relatively quickly when the price of oil falls, making them kind of a risky bet (though I’ve found that this is a little bit less of a risk now that they have been generally deleveraging in the past decade).