Permian – update through October 2019

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 24,837 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through October 2019.

Oil production rose in October, to around 3.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). As is visualized in the graph above, the over 4,000 horizontal wells that came online in the first 10 months of 2019 contributed more than half of the oil output in October (and over 75% if you include the 2018 vintage as well).

Well productivity edged higher in 2019, which you can view in the “Well quality” tab. But this does not take into account that laterals also got longer, as explained in the previous post on this basin. In the Delaware Basin, where laterals increased by almost 50% between 2016 and 2019, well results are lower since 2016, on a normalized basis (image taken from our advanced analytics service):

In the final tab, all the major operators in the Permian can be found. Anadarko (not on the list) is not yet included in the Occidental numbers. Exxon Mobil is now also in the list; it has grown production even faster than its peers, as it quadrupled output since early 2018.

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.

By extrapolating these curves, you can see that recently completed wells are on a trajectory to recover around 300 thousand barrels of oil before they have declined to a production rate of 40 b/d.

But not all wells are created equally. The following dashboard, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics, displays all the horizontal wells that started production since 2011. The chart on the right ranks all the counties in the Permian Basin, by the average cumulative production in the first 2 years. The map shows you the location of all these wells, colored by the same metric:

Howard and Midland county show the best results on this metric, with over 180 thousand barrels of oil produced in the first 2 years, on average.

Early next week, we will have a new post on the Eagle Ford.

The week after, we will be in Houston for the NAPE summit. If you are there as well, make sure you collect free caramel waffles at our booth #3019! Maybe you even would like to know more about our new production forecasting module?

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.

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.