Permian – update through February 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 26,826 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through February.

Total production

Oil production from horizontal wells has hovered around 4 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions) in the Permian since November. Natural gas production has now edged above 14 Bcf/d, which is double the output of two years ago.

Well productivity

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.

Ring Energy

Almost 2 weeks ago, our friends at Wildcax released this in-depth report on Ring Energy, a Permian pure-player: Ring Energy, Inc.: An RBL Case Study, for which they have used our analytics service. We agree with their assessment that it appears that actual well results are quite a bit behind the type curves used by this operator. In this screenshot from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional), you can see the performance and location of all the 179 horizontal wells that it brought online outside the Delaware Basin (in which it completed 4 wells) between 2016 and 2019:

Although the 8 wells that it completed in 2016 are on a slightly higher trajectory, the later wells displayed here are on a path to recover less than 100 thousand barrels of oil, on average, before they decline to a production rate of 20 bo/d. In contrast, Ring Energy used type curves with EURs well above 300 thousand barrels of oil equivalent (almost all oil).

Finally

More recent data is available in our subscription services (85% of the wells in Texas have already March production data). We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford later this week.

We have received many positive responses regarding our Covid-19 promotion and we have decided to extend it; if you (or people you know) work in a field related to the US shale industry and your income has massively fallen, you can apply for a free temporary account of ShaleProfile Analytics, in order to stay well-informed: Apply for our Covid-19 offer

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.