Permian – update through January 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 26,331 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through January.

Total production

January oil production came in at about 4 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). I expect to see a small increase from the December level when all data is in.

In the last few weeks we have again improved our handling of the data in Texas and it is now more up-to-date and complete. Already close to 90% of February production data in the state of Texas is available in our subscription services.

Supply Projection dashboard

Although the rig count has also dropped significantly in the Permian in recent weeks, the relative decline has been less than other basins. The following image, taken from our publicly available  Supply projection dashboard, shows that the horizontal rig count is down to 274 as of last week. However, the bottom chart reveals that even this level of drilling activity would not make a serious dent in the long-term production capacity of the basin:

This does assume that the rig count drops no further and that no production is shut-in temporarily due to the extraordinary low prices (as well as no changes in productivity). Although these assumptions are surely highly flawed, this overview does make clear that a further reduction in drilling is needed before the Permian would turn to an overall decline to help balance the markets.

Tomorrow we will have a webinar on this dashboard, at 9am (CT). Although the maximum number of registrants has already been reached (100), we will still try to increase this number. Therefore, don’t hesitate to sign up: Register for the Supply Projection webinar

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.

Finally

As mentioned, tomorrow we will host a webinar on our Supply projection dashboard and how you can use it for your own projections.

We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford on Tuesday.

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.