Enno PetersThese interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data, from all 9,202 horizontal wells that started production in the DJ-Niobrara since 2009/2010, through December.
We needed a bit more time with the latest data on the Permian, so that post is now planned for Friday or early next week. It has been almost a year since we last covered the DJ-Niobrara in a post, so what has happened here since?
Total production
Oil production in the DJ-Niobrara fell by almost 1/3rd from 579 thousand b/d to 390 thousand b/d in the 13 months from the peak in November 2019 through December last year. The wells in this area have high decline rates and in 2020 fewer than half the number of wells were completed (588) than in the years before. December production was the lowest level in over 3 years.
Natural gas production has fared much better (toggle ‘product’ to gas), and came in at 2.8 Bcf/d last December, not far below the previous peak (3.1 Bcf/d).
Supply Projection dashboard
The number of drilling rigs has increased again from just 1 in Q3 last year to 7 as of last week (according to the Baker Hughes rig count). What does that mean for our outlook of the basin? Let’s take a look at our Supply Projection dashboard:
As you can see in the bottom graph, despite the increase in rig count, more declines are expected as the current number only supports a production level of around 300 thousand bo/d.
Bloomberg used our Supply Projection dashboard in ShaleProfile Analytics last week to show what would happen with US tight oil if the number of rigs would double this year: The Giants of U.S. Shale Are Proving OPEC Right With Discipline (spoiler: it would take 2 years before the previous US tight oil peak would be topped).
Well productivity
In the ‘Well quality’ tab you’ll find that well productivity has not changed by much since 2017.
Top operators
Two years ago, Occidental purchased Anadarko and more recently Chevron acquired Noble. Those acquisitions have made them the top producers in this basin (see “Top operators”), followed by PDC and Extraction Oil & Gas.
Advanced Insights
The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:
This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows how these horizontal wells are heading towards their ultimate recovery. They are grouped by the year in which production started.
This reveals (by extrapolating the curves) that more recent wells will recover just shy of 200 thousand barrels of oil, before declining to below a production rate of 10 bo/d, on average.
Finally
Our post on the Permian will probably be up by Friday.
Production data is subject to revisions.
Sources
For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:
- Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
- Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
- FracFocus.org
Brief manual
The above presentation has 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.
News, trends and data for the US upstream industry
Novi Energy Newsletter
