Permian – update through March 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 27,209 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through March.

Total production

In March, about 4.1 million bo/d was produced from horizontal wells in the Permian (after upcoming revisions). The impact of the low prices only started to become visible in the following month, although, based on preliminary data (available in our subscription services), the drop appears to have been less than e.g. in North Dakota.

Supply Projection dashboard

But the horizontal rig count has fallen by 2/3rds since the start of this year, to just 131 rigs last week, according to Baker Hughes. At this level, and assuming no changes in rig & well productivity, the output would fall some time next year to below 3 million bo/d, as you can find in our Supply projection dashboard, after selecting this basin:

Surprisingly, as is visible in the graph above, output would still grow in the New Mexico part of the basin, as the rig count has declined less severely there.

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.

Operator ranking

Which operators have the best performing wells in the Permian? The Productivity Ranking dashboard within our analytics service can easily answer this question:

On the right side you can see this ranking, with only the operators selected that operate at least 100 horizontal wells. SM Energy is in the lead, as the 234 wells that it brought online since 2012 (and have operated at least for a year) recovered over 160 thousand barrels of oil in the first year, on average. Ring Energy, which we discussed in our previous post, is near the bottom. On the map you will find all the selected wells, colored by this same metric (red is better).

Finally

More recent data is available in our subscription services (90%+ of the wells in the Permian already have April production data). We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford early 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.