Permian – update through July 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 28,071 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through July.

Total Production

Oil production in the Permian recovered further in July, to around 3.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). Natural gas production was at over 14 Bcf/d close to the March high (toggle Product to gas to see this).

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count has slowly grown in this basin over the past 3 months, to 128 as of last week (source Baker Hughes). This was however still more than 2/3rds below the count in mid-March. The current level should be able to sustain just below 3 million b/d, as you can find in our Supply projection dashboard by selecting this basin:

We therefore expect that after July the decline has set in again.

Well Performance

In the “Well quality” tab, the production profiles for all these wells are visualized. Well results greatly improved until about 2016, after which the rate of improvements slowed down significantly. In the past 2 years, average well productivity has almost not changed (unnormalized; thus not taking into account changes in well design).

The following chart reveals how performance has changed in each of the top-8 producing counties in the Permian, based on the average cumulative oil production in the first 2 years (source: ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional):

Loving County was in the lead in 2018, as the oil wells here recovered almost 250 thousand barrels of oil in the first 2 years. Reeves County is the only one on the list that saw some deterioration in 2018 compared with the year before.

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 later this week.

ShaleProfile has started to expand coverage now to outside US shale; in our analytics portal you will also find highly up-to-date production data from wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

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.