Pennsylvania – update through January 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 9,476 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through January.

January gas production was flat m-o-m at 19.3 Bcf/d. Year-over-year growth was 1 Bcf/d, down from 2.5 Bcf/d growth one year earlier.

Wells have gotten far more productive in the last decade, as you’ll see in the Well quality tab. However, the rate of improvements has markedly slowed down since 2017.

The top 5 operators (shown in the last overview) are good for more than 50% of total production in the state.

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.

New wells are on track to recover more than 10 Bcf of natural gas, before their production rate has dropped to below 500 Mcf/d.

In the following dashboard (taken from the Professional version of ShaleProfile Analytics), we can analyze the well performance of Cabot vs. Chesapeake in the northeast of the state:

On the map you can see all the wells that these operators completed between 2016 and 2018. You can also see that we’ve improved our maps, as now the townships and ranges are visible. On the right, you can see for each operator and vintage a performance curve. Both operators improved well results since 2016, but Cabot shows the largest improvements. Its new wells are on track to recover more than 8 Bcf of natural gas by 2 years on production.

We expect that the Texas RRC will release production data for January in the coming days. By the middle of next week, we should 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.