Pennsylvania – update through May 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 9,661 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through May.

Total production

Natural gas production in this state fell by almost 0.5 Bcf/d in May, a larger decline than is common for this month. Compared with last year, output is still up by 0.6 Bcf/d. At 241, fewer wells came online in the first 5 months of the year than in any such period in the past decade.

Supply Projection dashboard

With still only 18 rigs drilling horizontal wells (according to the Baker Hughes rig count), we foresee no more production growth in the coming period and expect output to gradually decline over time (assuming no changes in rig count and rig/well productivity):

Well productivity

Well results have barely changed since 2018, on average, after many years of strong improvements (see the “Well quality” tab).

Top operators

EQT, the largest operator in this area, showed the biggest decline in output in May, -0.4 Bcf/d, which brought it back to the level it had 1.5 years earlier (“Top operators”).

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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

Finally

Next week we will have a post on all covered states in the US, followed by an update on June production in North Dakota.

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.