Permian – update through April 2018

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data through April from all 15,532 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing since 2008/2009.

The graph above shows the rapid growth of unconventional oil production from horizontal wells in the Permian where total oil output doubled in the past 2 years. As usual for this region, recent data is incomplete, and I expect that after revisions April production has set another record to over 2.2 million bo/d.

In the “well quality” tab the production profiles for all these  wells can be analyzed. The bottom graph shows that average well performance strongly increased from 2013 to 2016, and has not much changed since then.

The 3 leading operators, Pioneer, Concho and EOG, have more than tripled their operated production in the past 4 years (see the ‘top operators’ overview).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows the average production rate for these wells, plotted against their cumulative recovery. Wells are grouped by the quarter in which production started.

Here you can see that recent wells track quite closely the performance of the wells that started in Q2 2016 (the light green curve), which have in 2 years recovered on average 180 thousand barrels of oil and are now at a production rate of 132 bo/d.

The graph in the 5th tab (‘Productivity over time’) displays how well productivity, as measured by the average cumulative production in the first 2 years, has evolved over time. You’ll note that this metric almost tripled from 2013 to 2016, to more than 180 thousand barrels of oil.

The next update will be on the Eagle Ford, followed by a post on all 10 covered states in the US.

Within the next week we are launching here our new online analytics service, with which the data and trends for more than 100 thousand horizontal wells in the US can be analyzed in user-friendly dashboards.

You can already find a bit of information on the following page for this, where also a trial account can be requested: ShaleProfile Analytics

Production data is subject to revisions.

Note that a significant portion of production in the Permian comes from vertical wells and/or wells that started production before 2008, which are excluded from these presentations.

For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Texas RRC. Oil production is estimated for individual wells, based on a number of sources, such as lease & pending production data, well completion & inactivity reports, regular well tests and oil proration data.
• OCD in New Mexico. Individual well production data is provided.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentations have many interactive features:

• 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.