Enno Peters
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 9,944 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through November.
Total production
Pennsylvanian natural gas production jumped in November (as it often does) and set a new record at almost exactly 20 Bcf/d. The previous high was a year earlier in November 2019 at 19.6 Bcf/d. As is visualized in the chart above, almost half of this output in November was produced from wells that came online in the past 2 years (dark & light blue colors).
Supply Projection dashboard
The horizontal rig count was down to 17 as of last week (source: Baker Hughes rig count). The last time it was lower for more than a week was in 2016. Although well productivity is up by a bit (see next section), this level of drilling activity will not be enough to sustain current output:
This image was taken from our publicly available Supply Projection dashboard. Note that the version that allows one to change several parameters such as the future rig count is now only available in our subscription service.
Well productivity
Average well productivity has again improved in 2020, as visualized in the “Well quality” tab. The wells that came online last year are on track to recover about 5 Bcf of natural gas in the first 2 years.
Top operators
In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 8 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania can be found. All these operators were at or near their production records.
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.
If you group the data by quarter, you will see more recent data; note that probably some high-grading took place in Q2/Q3 last year, as there was a jump in performance with the smaller number of completions.
Finally
Almost exactly 5 years ago, we published our first blog post on North Dakota, which is still available here.
We were happy to see that the Wall Street Journal has been using our new Permit activity dashboard in this story from yesterday, regarding the ban on new drilling permits on federal lands: Biden’s Order to Freeze New Oil Drilling on Federal Land: What You Need to Know. They noticed a steep increase in permitting activity last year, probably in preparation for this ban.
Early next week we will have a post on all covered states in the US.
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.
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