Permian – update through November 2021

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 33,545 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through November.

Total Production

Permian tight oil production rose to 4.4 million b/d in November, a new high (after upcoming revisions, horizontal wells only). Through November, 3,850 horizontal wells were completed, more than in the full year before (3,600).

Drilling Activity

The horizontal rig count in the basin has increased to 289 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes), with 20% of the rigs now active in Lea County (NM):

Lea County

Here you can find the top 5 operators in Lea County, based on total oil production in November:

EOG was responsible for almost all production growth in Lea in the last 2 years, and it has increased output 6-fold over the last 5 years to 240 thousand b/d in November.

Well productivity of EOG in Lea

The following overview presents how EOG’s well results have changed over time Lea:

The chart plots the average production rate of all EOG’s wells here against cumulative production, by vintage year of first production. Based on this metric, you can see that its well results greatly improved up until 2016, after which it has stagnated. Extrapolating these curves show that the wells completed in the last 5 years will recover around 600 thousand barrels by the time they have declined to 20 b/d, on average.

However, normalizing for lateral length reveals that EOG has been challenged to maintain well results on a per foot basis:

Finally

Next week, we will have a new post on all covered US states. December production is already available in our subscription services for almost all Permian wells in our database.

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.