Pennsylvania – update through April 2021

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

These interactive presentations contain the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 10,107 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through April.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania fell by 1% in April, to 20.3 Bcf/d (hz. wells only).  Only 160 new horizontal wells were completed through April this year, versus 180 and 206 in the same period in 2020 & 2019, respectively.

Supply projection

In the past year, as well as last week, 18 rigs were drilling horizontal wells in Pennsylvania (according to Baker Hughes). Despite record high well productivity (see the Well Quality tab), this level appears not enough to sustain current output, as is shown in our Supply Projection dashboard:

If nothing else changes (which it typically will), natural gas production may slowly decline from here, until about 19 Bcf/d by the end of the year.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 10 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed. EQT & Chesapeake, the numbers 1 and 2, are together good for over 1/3rd of total gas production. They are at opposite sides in the state, and their well performance is rather different:

You can see that Chesapeake’s wells improved significantly between 2018 and 2020, while those operated by EQT barely changed. The 70 wells that Chesapeake completed last year recovered 3.8 Bcf of natural gas in the first 5 months, and were at that time still producing at a rate above 20 MMcf/d, on average. Although Chesapeake clearly outperforms EQT on this metric, EQT’s wells are in a wetter part of the basin. This image was taken from our Production Profiles dashboard.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on the Haynesville.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

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

• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
• 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.