Permian – update through August 2021

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 from all 32,787 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through August.

Total Production

Permian tight oil production is slowly accelerating and in August rose to about 4.2 million b/d (after upcoming revisions, horizontal wells only), the highest since April 2020 and less than 300 thousand b/d below the peak in March 2020. Natural gas production is already setting new records every month, and came in at 16.6 Bcf/d in August.

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count in the basin has increased to 258 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes), which is already sufficient to sustain further growth in the coming months and years, assuming that well & rig productivity can be maintained:

This image was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard.

Completion designs

Well productivity in the US tight basins has greatly changed in the past 2 decades, especially driven by longer laterals and larger proppant loadings. Here we show how these 2 parameters have changed in the Permian Basin:

This year, wells were completed with 20 million pounds of proppants, on average, for the first time. However, as laterals increased in proportion to proppant loadings since 2018, the proppant intensity (proppants / lateral length) has hovered around a level of 2 thousand pounds per lateral ft since 2017, as the bottom chart reveals.

Well productivity

In this post we’ll take a closer look at well productivity trends in the southern part of the Delaware basin:

On the map you can find the almost 8 thousand horizontal wells included in our analysis, by county. On the right, you can find the production profiles for these wells, by vintage year of first production, normalized by lateral length (rate vs. cumulative production, per 1,000 ft of lateral length).

As you can see, well productivity as measured by this metric has fallen since 2016.

This could be an explanation of why production has fallen sharper in Reeves and Loving, compared with other top-producing counties in the Permian Basin:

Finally

We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford later this week.

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.