Haynesville – update through May 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 5,628 horizontal wells in the Haynesville that started producing from 2007, through May 2020. The last time we had a separate post on this basin was over a year ago. But we noticed that drilling activity is relatively high in this basin (even higher than in the Marcellus!), and it is the only major US shale basin for which we predict output growth, based on current activity levels.

Our thoughts are with the residents of this area and south of it, which is being hit at the moment by hurricane Laura.

Total production

Natural gas production came in close to 11 Bcf/d in May (after upcoming revisions), more than double the level compared with 4 years earlier, and far above the earlier peak set in 2011. What happened in the last 4 years?

Well productivity

As you can find in the “Well quality” tab, well productivity has dramatically increased since 2015. Recently completed wells are on track to recover more than 7 Bcf of natural gas in the first 3 years on production (see the bottom chart), which is double the amount that wells before 2015 managed. How was that made possible?

Completion designs have changed a lot in these years. Laterals in the Haynesville are up from 6,000 to almost 8,000 feet, while proppant loadings have roughly tripled to about 30 million pounds per completion:

Supply Projection dashboard

There were 6 more rigs drilling horizontal wells in the Haynesville than in the Marcellus Basin (32 vs 26) as of last week (according to the Baker Hughes rig count). About 2/3rd of the activity is on the Louisiana side of the play (from our publicly available  Supply Projection dashboard):

As the image shows, at the current drilling & completion rate, output may grow steadily over time, even though also here the rig count is just half of what it was early last year.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the leading 5 natural gas producers in the Haynesville can be seen. Chesapeake and BP were the only major operators that did not grow output in the past year.

The well performance of all operators can be easily compared within our ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional) service:

On the right side you can see all the operators with at least 10 operated wells, ranked by the average cumulative natural gas recovered by their wells in the first 2 years. On the map all wells are shown, colored by the same metric.

By this measure, Goodrich Petroleum and Vine are in the lead. Their wells recovered over 4 Bcf of natural gas in the first 2 years on production, on average.

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.

Unfortunately for the operators here, these curves are concave downward, which indicates a hyperbolic decline with a b-factor lower than 1.

Finally

Next week we will have a post on all covered states in the US.

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.