Haynesville – update through December 2020

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

This interactive presentation contains the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 5,880 horizontal wells in the Haynesville that started producing from 2007, through December 2020.

Total production

Natural gas production came in close to 11 Bcf/d in December (after upcoming revisions), approaching the peak of May 2020, even though fewer wells were completed in 2020 compared with the 2 years before (~350 vs. 421 & 432 in 2019/2018).

Supply Projection dashboard

Interest in the basin has really picked up  in the last 10 months, with 50% more rigs drilling horizontal wells than in May 2020 (47 according to the Baker Hughes rig count). We estimate that the Haynesville is already setting new production records at the moment, which is also visible in our Supply Projection dashboard, after selecting this basin:

As is visualized here in the bottom chart, the current rig count could sustain a production level of close to 18 Bcf/d by the end of the decade, if nothing else changes (which of course it will).

Well productivity

Initial production rates in the Haynesville are very high, compared with for example the Marcellus. But the declines are also steeper, so we expect that after about 20 years on production, the differences in EUR are actually quite small. This is visible in the following chart from a dashboard in our service in which we are displaying the 20-year production forecasts that we create for all wells in our database with a sufficient production history:

The dotted part of these curves reflect our production forecasts. You can see that for the selected wells, the average gas EUR after 20 years in both basins is close to 12 Bcf of natural gas.

In the “Well quality” tab in the interactive presentation at the top of this page, you can also see the strong increase in performance compared with wells that began producing before 2016. An important reason behind this improvement is that proppant loadings have more than tripled in the past 5 years, with proppant intensity now averaging around 4,000 pounds of proppants per lateral foot.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the leading 10 natural gas producers in this basin are displayed. Comstock is well in the lead, with an operated output of 1.8 Bcf/d. Aethon Energy just took over the 2nd spot from Indigo.

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Recovery” overview reveals the relationship between gas production rates and cumulative gas production, averaged for all horizontal wells that began production in a particular year.

Also here the improvements in well productivity can be nicely seen. If you group the wells by quarter, you will see that the 79 wells that started producing in Q3 2020 had the best start ever.

Finally

Early next week we will have a post on the Permian again.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• The Louisiana Department of Natural Resources
• Texas RRC. Production data is provided on lease level. Individual well production data is estimated from a range of data sources, including regular well tests, and pending lease reports.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentations have many interactive features:

• You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.
• Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items.
• You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.
• Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.
• You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.
• By clicking on the legend you can highlight selected items.
• Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.
• The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.
• If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Enno Peters

Enno Peters is General Manager at Novi, where he has build an AI-driven data & analytics platform tailored for oil & gas operators and energy investors. Prior to Novi, Enno founded ShaleProfile which was acquired by Novi late 2021.