Pennsylvania – update through March 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 9,565 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through March.

Total production

Natural gas production fell by 1% m-o-m to 19.3 Bcf/d in March, the same level as in January. In the first quarter of this year, 144 wells started production, very much inline with the same period in the previous 3 years.

Supply Projection dashboard

However, natural-gas prices have dropped to their lowest level in a quarter-century and with 18 horizontal rigs as of last week (according to the Baker Hughes rig count), drilling activity is at the lowest level since 2016. At this pace, assuming no changes in well & rig productivity, you can find in our Supply projection dashboard that production will likely decline in the coming quarters:

Well productivity

Well productivity has improved somewhat since 2017; new wells recover almost 5 Bcf of natural gas in the first 3 years, on average (see the “Well quality” tab).

Well productivity

EQT is, after its acquisition of Rice Energy, the largest natural gas producer in Pennsylvania, with 3.7 Bcf/d of operated natural gas production capacity (“Top operators”).

However, its well performance is still behind that of Cabot, the number 2 (which operates in the opposite corner of Pennsylvania), as you can see in the following chart from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional):

This image reveals that Cabot’s wells recover on average just over 7.5 Bcf of natural gas in the first 2 years, compared with about 5.2 Bcf for EQT. However, this does not take into account that in recent quarters Cabot’s well productivity has slightly fallen.

Advanced Insights

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.

Finally

Two days ago we were referenced in a Bloomberg article: Oil’s Sudden Rebound Is Exposing the Achilles’ Heel of Shale

Early next week we will have a new post on all the 13 states that we cover.

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.