Pennsylvania – update through September 2019

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 9,239 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through September.

September gas production came in at 18.6 Bcf/d, unchanged from the previous month. After several years of major improvements, well productivity is up only by a few percent since 2017 (see the “Well quality” tab).

The horizontal rig count has declined drastically since the start of the year. Last week only 21 rigs (drilling horizontal wells) were active, the lowest in more than 3 years, versus 49 at the start of the year. With completion activity still relatively normal in recent months, this decline in drilling has reduced the DUC count to the lowest point in many years. You can see this in the “Well status” tab, if you only select DUCs using the well status filter.

Several of the leading operators are at record production levels, as you’ll find the final tab (“Top operators”).

The new “Productivity ranking” dashboard, available in our analytics service, allows us to easily rank the major natural gas operators here by their average well performance:

Above you can see all the horizontal wells that began production since 2010, in the northeast section of Pennsylvania. The operators are ranked according to the average cumulative gas recovered by their wells in the first 2 years. As the list reveals, Cabot is on this measure far in the lead, with over 5 Bcf. The map displays the location of all wells, colored by the same metric.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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

We plan to have new updates on the Permian and the Eagle Ford next week.

Production data is subject to revisions. 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.