Pennsylvania – update through May 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 10,163 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through May.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania was flat month over month in May, at 20.2 Bcf/d (hz. wells only). Year over year growth was 1.4 Bcf/d, despite that last year only 560 wells were completed, the lowest in over a decade. How was that possible?

Well productivity

In the ‘Well quality’ tab, you will find the production profiles of all these wells, and you can clearly see that well productivity improved again significantly in 2020.

This can also be nicely viewed in the following chart from our Production Profiles dashboard:

The 561 horizontal wells completed in 2020 recovered 2.3 Bcf of natural gas in the first 6 months on production,  and were still flowing at over 10 thousand Mcf/d at that point, on average.

Terminal decline rates

What kind of decline rates are we observing for older wells with about 10 years of production behind them?

To answer that question, we developed the Terminal decline rates dashboard:

The top chart displays the average production rate of horizontal wells in Pennsylvania, by vintage and number of years since production start.  The bottom chart displays the effective annual decline rates for the same wells. You can now easily observe that the horizontal wells that were completed in 2010/11 are now, after 10 years, doing on average 500 Mcf/d (top chart) and that their effective annual decline rate has fallen to about 7-8% a year.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 10 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed, with EQT and Chesapeake in the lead. Most of these operators were at or near their historical output record in May.

Finally

Unfortunately we couldn’t make it to the URTeC this week, due to the travel restrictions still in place. We hope all participants have a great event nonetheless!

Later this week we will have a new post on 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.