Pennsylvania – update through July 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 10,248 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through July.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania was flat month over month in August, at 20.3 Bcf/d (hz. wells only). Despite nearly decade natural gas prices, the number of wells that came online through July (302) is the lowest in over a decade.

Supply Projection

Already since June last year the number of rigs drilling horizontal wells in Pennsylvania has hovered around a level of 18 (according to Baker Hughes), even though natural gas prices have more than doubled since:

Recently more wells have been completed than drilled, reducing the number of DUCs in the basin. But if drilling activity doesn’t increase from here, not much more can be expected to meet the increase in natural gas demand:

This image was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard and it shows our projection for natural gas production in Pennsylvania, with the 18 rigs currently active, and assuming no changes in rig/well productivity.

Permit activity

In the following overview you can see how permit activity has evolved this year:

Although you can see that a relatively high number of permits were approved in August (74) and September (54), it remains to be seen whether the trend is upwards.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the output and well locations of the top 8 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed.

Finally

Next week we will have a post on the US and one on North Dakota, which will release August production data in the coming days.

We keep improving our data coverage; now for several states (ND & TX) we already include stage count data in our data subscription, next to digital directional survey and completion data.

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.