Permian – update through August 2020

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

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 28,483 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through August.

Total Production

Tight oil production in the Permian was roughly flat in August, at close to 3.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions), probably slightly below the level a year earlier. Natural gas production set a new record at 15 Bcf/d (also after upcoming revisions; toggle Product to ‘Gas’ to see this).

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count here has increased in the past 3 months, to 145 as of last week (source Baker Hughes). Still, this level of activity would long-term only be able to support a tight oil output about 1 million bo/d lower than in August (2.8 million bo/d), as you can find in our Supply Projection dashboard by selecting this basin:

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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

By extrapolating the recent vintages, you’ll note that they probably will end up with an ultimate recovery of close to 500 thousand barrels of oil, on average (ignoring extra stimulation measures).

The following screenshot, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional), shows the ranking of all Permian operators, based on the average 12-months cum. oil recovery.:

Of the major operators (100+ wells), Cimarex has the best results with 183 thousand barrels of oil in the first year, on average. All its wells included here are in the Delaware Basin.

Finally

September production data is already for almost 90% complete within our subscription services. We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford early next week, followed by Pennsylvania.

Within ShaleProfile Analytics, we will start covering well permitting activity in the coming weeks. Check out more announcements on this topic in upcoming posts.

Production and completion data are 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.

Sources

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 production data.
• OCD in New Mexico. Individual well production data is provided.
• 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.