Pennsylvania – update through August 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 9,802 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through August.

Total production

Natural gas production came in at about 19.5 Bcf/d in August (after upcoming revisions), almost touching the high in November last year. Only 382 horizontal wells were brought online this year through August, the lowest number in a decade.

Supply Projection dashboard

With only 17-18 rigs drilling horizontal wells here since the end of May (source: Baker Hughes rig count), we project a steady decline in output (see our Supply Projection dashboard), despite record well productivity:

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 5 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania can be found. They were all at or near record production in August. EQT also restored its output, after curtailing a large portion of its wells in June due to low prices.

Top counties

In this screenshot, taken from our ShaleProfile Analytics service, you can find the top-1o natural gas producing counties in Pennsylvania:

The map on the right side displays the locations of all these wells. Susquehanna County, with an output of over 4.5 Bcf/d, is clearly in the lead. It produces over 10 times more natural gas than the #10 on this list, Sullivan County.

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.

If you group the wells by quarter, you will see that the wells that came online in the 2nd quarter this year had the best start ever; these 129 wells recovered 1.3 Bcf of natural gas in the first 3 calendar months on production.

Finally

Early 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:

• 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.