Pennsylvania – update through March 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 10,061 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through March.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania was flat in March at 20.6 Bcf/d (hz. wells only, after revisions). Year over year growth was just over 1 Bcf/d. With only 126 new horizontal wells completed through March, completion activity is at a decade low.

Well productivity

Well productivity has improved to an amazing extent from 10 years ago; the 1,004 horizontal wells that came online in 2011 are on track to recover about 4 Bcf of natural gas in their first 10 years on production (see “Well quality”), on average. The 561 horizontal wells that began production last year will likely recover this same amount in just a single year, on average.

Important factors behind this are longer laterals and larger proppant loadings:

In this chart you can see how these key completion parameters have changed in Pennsylvania, since 2013. It reveals that lateral lengths in Pennsylvania more than doubled since 2013, to over 10 thousand feet by the middle of last year, and that proppant loadings more than quadrupled.

EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the state, increased its average proppant loading even to 25 million pounds per completion in recent quarters:

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 10 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed. Chesapeake, at over 3 Bcf/d of capacity now, appears to be closing the gap with EQT.

It’s well results improved strongly in 2020, as is visible in this screenshot from our Production Profiles dashboard:

The 70 wells that it brought online last year are on track to recover about 7 Bcf of natural gas in the first year, on average, well outperforming its competitors.

Finally

Later this week or early next week, we will have a new post covering the Haynesville.

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.