MCF

MCF is oilfield shorthand for a thousand cubic feet of natural gas, and it's the basic unit the industry uses to measure, report, and price gas production — the gas equivalent of a barrel for oil. A well's daily gas rate gets quoted in MCF per day, gas sales contracts get priced per MCF (or per MMBtu once heat content is factored in), and compressor packages get sized around how many MCF per day they need to move at a given suction and discharge pressure.

Because MCF shows up in nearly every conversation about production, economics, and equipment sizing, it's one of the first pieces of vocabulary anyone new to the industry has to pick up. Guests on the show use it constantly and casually — both to describe the sheer effort behind getting a single MCF out of the ground and to market economically, and to point to the environmental performance of U.S. production, since the country produces what guests call "the cleanest MCF of gas" anywhere in the world.

MCF also shows up as the common denominator that lets very different parts of the business talk to each other in the same units: a compressor package gets rated by how many MCF per day it can move at a given suction and discharge pressure, a gathering system's capacity gets described in MCF, and a well's economics get modeled around the price received per MCF sold, so nearly every conversation about equipment sizing, contracts, or field economics eventually comes back to this one unit of measure.