Permian – update through December 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 29,694 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through December last year.

Total Production

Permian tight oil production was basically unchanged in December at close to 3.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions, hz. wells only). The ~3,700 horizontal wells that came online in 2020 replaced almost 1.7 million b/d of the underlying base decline of 2.0 million b/d for the year. Natural gas output was 15 Bcf/d in December,  close to the peak in October (15.1 Bcf/d).

Supply Projection

Since our update on this basin last month, only 5 more rigs returned here to drill horizontal wells (to 198 as of last week according to Baker Hughes), the lowest m-o-m growth since September. Nonetheless, this has again slightly raised our outlook for the basin,  as you can find in our Supply Projection dashboard:

The bottom chart shows our projection for Permian tight oil (hz wells) if the rig count would stay at this level. It reveals that production will soon bottom out and may start rising again. I expect to see more rigs coming back in the coming weeks, and therefore this outlook is likely to be revised upward.

Bloomberg used this dashboard in our subscription service, in which you can also change various assumptions including the future rig count, for this story last Friday: The Giants of U.S. Shale Are Proving OPEC Right With Discipline. They simulated what would happen if the horizontal rig count in the US would roughly double by year’s end, and found that the previous tight oil peak would be reached only by the end of next year.

Permit Activity

From our Permit Activity dashboard, we can easily see which operators have been most active in applying for new horizontal wells in 2021 through yesterday (March 18th):

As you can see, Occidental and Pioneer were most active this year, with 112 and 97 permits respectively. The interactive version of this dashboard also allows you to see the exact location of these permits, and download all the details.

Well productivity

In the ‘Well quality’ tab, in the interactive presentation at the top, you can find that well productivity was basically unchanged in 2020, compared with the year before. After normalizing for lateral length (a subscription-only feature), we find that overall performance is slightly down from 2016:

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.

Finally

We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford in the middle of next 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.