Niobrara (CO & WY) – update through February 2020

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

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data, from all 11,990 horizontal wells that started production in Colorado and Wyoming since 2009/2010, through February.

Originally I planned to do a post on the Permian today, but we just noticed that more up-to-date data will be available in our services tomorrow. Therefore, I postponed that post to early next week. It has been a year since we took a closer look at Colorado & Wyoming, so I opted for this area instead.

Total production

Oil production in these 2 states set a record in November last year at 734 thousand bo/d, more than double the rate compared with early 2017. However, in February it was down to 670 thousand bo/d.

Supply Projection dashboard

Drilling activity has already steadily declined since February 2019 (52 horizontal rigs) and reached a decade low last week at 11 rigs, according to the Baker Hughes rig count.

In our publicly available Supply Projection dashboard you can see that if this level of drilling activity would not change, production would drop off quickly to less than half the February output:

If you missed our webinar on this dashboard, you can still find a recording here: Supply Projection webinar (YouTube)

Well productivity

In the bottom plot on the ‘Well quality’ tab you’ll find that well productivity made a big leap forward in 2017, but has since not further increased.

Top operators

Last year, Occidental purchased Anadarko and it is now the leading producer in this area (see “Top operators”).

The following dashboard, from our analytics service (Professional), shows the location and performance of the ~2,100 horizontal wells that it currently operates in Weld County, that came online since 2012:

As you can see, the wells that it now operates have struggled to show better productivity since 2014. The wells that started production in that year recovered almost 130 thousand barrels of oil (together with 0.9 Bcf of natural gas) in the first 5 years on production, on average.

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.

Finally

We’re currently working on adding the directional surveys to our data and analytics platform, which will allow us to precisely show and measure the wellbore paths. For Colorado, we aim to make these available in our analytics service before the end of the month (for North Dakota they are already available on our maps).

If you have been greatly impacted due to the direct or indirect effects of the pandemic and your work was/is some way related to the shale industry, you may want to take a look at our offer here: ShaleProfile Covid Hardship Offer

As mentioned earlier, we should have a new post on the Permian early next week. For most wells, March production data will be available in our subscription services some time tomorrow.

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.

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.