Pennsylvania – update through December 2019

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 9,417 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through December.

December gas production fell by 2.5%, to 19.1 Bcf/d. Compared with a year earlier, production was 1.1 Bcf/d higher (6%). However, with the decline in gas prices (below $2 in recent weeks), the horizontal rig count in Pennsylvania has fallen by half from early last year to just 22 last week.

Completion activity is not down with the same percentage, which has caused a reduction in DUCs in the past year of around 100 (13% of the total). The following overview (taken from our analytics service), shows the horizontal DUC count in Pennsylvania over time, colored by the year in which drilling started.

New wells are on average slightly better performing than earlier vintages, which can be seen in the bottom chart of the Well quality overview.

Southwestern Energy is the only large operator that produced less natural gas in December, compared with a year earlier, but it was close (see “top operators”).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Recovery” overview shows the relationship between gas production rates and cumulative gas production, averaged for all horizontal wells that began production in a particular year.

The Texas RRC just released new production data for December, which we are currently processing. I expect that this will become available in our service by Wednesday or Thursday. On Thursday, we plan to have a new post on the Permian.

Production data is subject to revisions. 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.