Haynesville – update through January 2021

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 5,905 horizontal wells in the Haynesville that started producing from 2007, through January.

Total production

Natural gas production set a new record in the Haynesville in January, at about 11.5 Bcf/d (after upcoming revisions).

Supply Projection dashboard

Among the 3 largest tight gas basins in the US (Haynesville, Marcellus, Utica), most rigs can now be found in this basin (46 out of 85 according to the Baker Hughes rig count). It is the only basin for which we see significant growth at this level of drilling activity, as you can find in our Supply Projection dashboard:

The total gas production in this basin could increase to 18 Bcf/d by the end of the decade, if nothing else changes (which of course it will), compared with 25 Bcf/d for the Marcellus and 6 Bcf/d for the Utica.

Well productivity

As we highlighted in our previous post on this basin, initial production rates are very high in the Haynesville, but due to steeper decline rates, ultimate recoveries may be quite similar as seen in the Marcellus. In this chart you can see the average production profiles in these 2 basins for wells that came online between 2016 & 2019:

In the chart you can nicely see that all the selected Haynesville vintages outperformed those for the Marcellus, but that the declines appear to accelerate later in life.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the leading 10 natural gas producers in this basin are displayed. Comstock is with 1.8 Bcf/d ahead of Aethon (1.4 Bcf/d) and Indigo (1.2 Bcf/d).

Its well productivity has also been consistently higher than those 2, as you can find in the following screenshot from the Productivity Over Time dashboard:

The chart on the top right visualizes the average well performance of these 3 producers since 2015, as measured by the cumulative gas recovered in the first 18 months. Comstock was with 6.7 Bcf on average in 2019 outperforming Aethon Energy (5.3 Bcf) and Indigo (4.9 Bcf). However, as the chart below it shows, its laterals were also longer than Aethon’s.

Finally

Early next week we will have a post on Pennsylvania, which has just released February production data (available in our subscription services).

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.