Range Resources on track toward production goals, will ‘toggle’ some drilling into 2027
The leaders of Range Resources Corp., Fort Worth, Tex., are shifting some second-half drilling plans into 2027 as the operator's teams emphasize trimming a backlog of drilled but uncompleted (DUC) wells.
Range drilled about 190,000 lateral ft across 11 wells and turned to sales roughly 300,000 ft with 21 wells. Crews completed nearly 1,900 frac stages across the company’s Appalachian footprint during the second quarter, which chief executive officer Dennis Degner told analysts on a July 22 conference call was a record for the company. Teams, Degner added, set several other records, including pumping a well for 22 hours of one day.
Those activities have kept Range Resources on track to finish 2026 with a production rate of 2.5 bcfed (from nearly 2.3 bcfed in the second quarter) and set the stage for that figure to grow to 2.6 bcfed next year. Degner said they’ve also put the company “a few wells ahead” of its 2026-27 investment plans.
“The plan was really to utilize the 400,000 lateral feet that essentially we had built up over the prior couple of years over the balance of 2026 and 2027. We’re still on track for that,” Degner said. “At kind of a high level of estimation, it has allowed us to pull down a little bit of our drilling needs this year. Then we’ll toggle that to a little bit more drilling activity next year, all within the same capital that we’ve communicated.”
Capital spending during the quarter was $222 million and Degner and his team are sticking to their full-year guidance of $650-700 million, adding that next year’s capex will be of a similar scale. Of the quarter’s net production, about 1.55 bcfd was natural gas and natural gas liquids totaled more than 118,000 b/d. In the first 3 months of this year, those numbers were 1.51 bcfd and 108,000, respectively.
Range produced a net profit of $195 million on total revenues of $834 million during the second quarter, numbers that were down from $238 million and $856 million, respectively, in the same period last year. Operating income was $249 million, down from $302 million a year earlier.
Shares of Range (Ticker: RRC) were up about 1% to $38.18 after the earnings report and conference call. Year to date, they’ve risen 8%, growing the company’s market capitalization to about $9 billion.
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Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.