A ‘BRIGHT SPOT’ IN PROJECT PIPELINE

about 200 oil and gas firms located or headquartered in the eleventh district—Texas, southern New Mexico, and northern Louisiana—that operate regionally, nationally, or internationally to gauge broad market conditions.

The outlook for capital investment is strong in the energy sector, where high commodity prices and disruptions in the supply of Russian oil and gas have provided an incentive for additional spending. In Q4 2022, the Dallas Fed’s Energy Survey’s capital expenditures index, its broadest measure of market conditions in the energy sector, remained high at 53.2. This indicates that most executives in this sector expect to increase capital expenditure in the year to come relative to the year prior. Expectations for future capital expenditures (6 months from now) are also high. Furthermore, both of these confident responses are continuations of the historically high levels of capital expenditure optimism we have seen since the middle of 2021.

A March 2023 Independent Project Analysis (IPA) market trends survey of over 35 onshore industrial companies (refining, chemical, consumer products, life sciences, mining) shows similar trends in the survey responses as we see in the public economic data. The survey data showed a similar trend in capital investment plans, where about