Permian – update through January 2023

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 40,902 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2007/2008 onward, through January 2023.

Total Production

Permian tight oil production topped 5 million b/d at the end of last year and came in at around 5.2 million b/d in January (after upcoming revisions, horizontal wells only). January natural gas production was close to 20 Bcf/d, over half the amount that was produced in the Appalachia Basin. Last year 5474 horizontal wells were completed in the Permian, 15% more than in 2021.

Production sharing

In my previous Permian post, the end of last year, I mentioned that Novi Labs has proprietary production agreements with operators and other parties, that have actual production data in Texas (non-allocated). Since then, we increased our coverage of actual accurate tight oil production data in this program from 12% to 18% in Texas, or more than 800 kb/d. Most of this is in the Midland Basin, where our coverage of actual (non-allocated) production data is even 35%. We expect more parties to sign up for this soon!

Drilling Activity

Drilling activity increased to the highest level in 3 years in recent weeks, to 343 horizontal rigs (99% drilling for oil), according to Baker Hughes:

Of these rigs, 56% are active in the Delaware Basin. It will be interesting to see whether the drop in WTI in the past 10 months is about to have an impact on these activity levels.

Well productivity

Well productivity is no longer increasing in the Permian Basin, despite further modest increases in average lateral length:

The top chart plots the cumulative oil recovered during the first 6 months versus production start date. It shows that the 568 horizontal oil wells that came online in the Delaware Basin in Q3 last year, and for which we already have 6 months of production data, recovered on average 130 thousand barrels of oil during the first 6 months, lower than the wells that started production a year earlier (140 thousand bbl). This does not take into account the increase in lateral length, which would worsen this trend (see our previous post on the Permian for a chart on that topic).

The bottom 2 charts show the increase in average lateral length and proppant loading since 2012, by basin.

Production forecasts

We are currently working on an exciting project with which we will generate accurate production forecasts for all horizontal wells, using Novi Labs advanced machine learning models, proprietary production data, subsurface & well spacing and various other types of data. This will be available in our data services in the coming months. Using our older traditional forecasting methodology, we expect that horizontal wells completed in recent years will recover close to 0.5 million barrels of oil during their life time:

Finally

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 individuals 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 the 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.