The Foucault Pendulum at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science swings across a craterlike, star-shaped floor, dutifully knocking down a circle of pins that surrounds it. The pendulum always crosses the same space, its movement illusory. It is the Earth below that imperceptibly rotates at close to 1,000 miles per hour.

In 2018, oil and gas A&D is a bit less elegant than Foucault’s 167-year-old invention. It’s more akin to the 1970s video game Pong, in which a meaningless white blob is batted back and forth for points.

Raymond James’ first-quarter 2018 report on A&D trends sizes up the latest swings in deal flow. The momentum of public companies rushing to buy private ones has lost momentum.

The resulting selloff of assets in the ABTP (anywhere but the Permian) has lit up the Rockies, among other regions, with deals. Private companies are now the buyers of billions of dollars in public company castoffs (i.e. noncore assets) in the past year.

At Hart Energy’s DUG Rockies conference in Denver, top level executives representing the five largest producers in North Dakota—Whiting Petroleum Corp., Hess Corp., Oasis Petroleum Inc. and Continental Resources Inc.—sang the Battle Hymn of the Bakken.

The verses touched on resurgence, renaissance and EURs.

“Bakken power,” Whiting CEO Brad Holly called it. The Bakken’s M&A tally in 2017 was about $5 billion in announced deals, according to Hess.

However, some of the same companies either sold or now are marketing Bakken assets. Whiting last year disposed of about $550 million in North Dakota, including its Fort Berthold area. The buyers were Warburg Pincus-backed Rimrock Oil & Gas.

Oasis, too, is selling outlier Bakken acreage—about 125,000 net acres it considers outside of its core. The company hopes to clear $500 million in gross proceeds, which it will use to reduce debt.

QEP Resources Inc.—which is also marketing nearly 116,000 net acres in the Williston assets—is also selling 110,000 assets in the Uinta Basin.

The buyers are predictably private-equity teams. As Raymond James noted: “The Rockies region has had the highest rate of private money moving in and public operations moving.”

Public E&Ps are divesting for a couple of reasons: to pour the capital in to newly acquired Permian acreage or to reduce debt and fund development on more core inventory.

But they also aren’t buying, particularly as investors have pressed E&Ps to plug balance sheet holes and carefully shepherd drilling programs so as to not deficit spend.

For private-equity firms, public E&Ps needing to exit good, but not perfect, positions have opened the door to the very companies who profited in the Midland and Delaware basins. Those companies are spending “freshly minted cash made available through the monetization of Permian assets in 2016 and early 2017,” Raymond James said.

In the past year, by Raymond James’ count, 24 of the past 40 Rockies deals have included a public seller that also holds Permian assets. It’s nice to see public E&Ps almost but not really getting some of their money back.

The sellers, however, are not strictly public. It has become more commonplace for private-equity firms to buy other private-equity assets. At Hart Energy’s Executive Capital Conference in Dallas, Craig Lande, a managing director at RBC Richardson Barr, noted that “PE-on-PE” transactions have increased by 17% so far this year.

In April, for instance, Ward Petroleum Corp. and backer Trilantic Capital Partners, a global private-equity firm, sold its Denver-Julesburg Basin assets. That followed a deal last year in which Ward sold Oklahoma Scoop acreage to buyer Camino Natural Resources, a source told Investor. Camino is backed by NGP Energy Capital Management.

The same trend has appeared in the Permian, too. Private-equity firm Riverstone Holdings agreed to sell Three Rivers Operating to Admiral Permian Resources, which in turn is backed by the private-equity arm of Ares Management.

As a private-equity insider recently told Investor, part of this churn is the natural evolution of oil and gas teams that start out small, grow into something larger and different and are purchased by larger funds. Such companies would rather buy something for $500 million than start from scratch at $150 million.

Sooner or later, the arc of the A&D pendulum will reach its high point, then it will steadily glide back—most likely to where it’s least expected.