Permian – update through March 2022

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 35,829 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2007/2008 onward, through March.

Total Production

Permian tight oil production set a new output record in March, at 4.5 million b/d (after upcoming revisions, horizontal wells only). Slightly more horizontal wells were completed in the first quarter of 2022 compared with last year (1,157 vs 1,008).

Drilling Activity

The horizontal rig count in the Permian has risen to 327 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes), with 97 of these located in New Mexico:

Well productivity

In the “Well quality” tab, the production profiles for all the horizontal wells in the Permian Basin can be found. The following overview shows how well productivity (normalized for lateral length) has changed in the Permian over time:

The top chart plots the average cumulative oil recovered in the first year, for every 1k feet of lateral length, by state. As you can see, this metric greatly increased in the years leading up to 2017, but it has slightly deteriorated afterward. The thickness of the curves is an indication of the relative well count.

Finally

Next week, we will have another post.

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.

Key Takeaways

• The dataset covers 35,829 horizontal wells in the Permian Basin that started producing from 2007/2008 onward, through March.
• Permian tight oil production from horizontal wells set a new record in March at 4.5 million b/d, pending revisions.
• Permian horizontal well completions totaled 1,157 in Q1 2022 versus 1,008 in Q1 2021.
• Baker Hughes reported a Permian horizontal rig count of 327 last week, including 97 rigs in New Mexico.
• Normalized well productivity (first-12-month cumulative oil per 1,000 feet of lateral length) increased through 2017 and slightly deteriorated afterward.
• Texas RRC, New Mexico OCD, and FracFocus.org were the primary data sources, and production and completion data are subject to revisions.