US – update through April 2021

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 145,364 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through April. Ohio & West Virginia are deselected in most dashboards, as they haven’t reported April production data yet.

Total production

US tight oil production was flat in April, month-over-month, at 7.1 million b/d (after upcoming revisions). Natural gas production (excl. Ohio & West Virginia) set a new record in April, at 70 Bcf/d (toggle the product switch to ‘gas’).

Horizontal drilling

The horizontal oil-directed rig count in the Lower 48 has more than doubled in the past 12 months, to 346 as last week (according to Baker Hughes). This is still less than half the number that were active 3 years ago, which was the last time when WTI prices were around $70/bbl:

Completion designs

The following chart shows how lateral lengths and proppant loadings have changed in the major tight oil basins (Bakken, Eagle Ford & Permian) since 2013:

Lateral lengths have increased from 6.5 thousand feet in 2013 to just over 9 thousand feet. Proppant intensity, as measured by the amount of proppants per lateral foot (shown in the bottom chart), increased sharply through 2017, but has hovered close to 2 thousand pounds per foot for a while now. In the interactive version of this dashboard, you can easily analyze these trends for any operator in any area.

Permian well productivity

With 2/3rd of the horizontal oil rigs, an important indicator to follow for US shale is well performance in the Permian Basin:

Here we can see the rate vs. cumulative production performance of 22 thousand horizontal oil wells in the Permian, that started production between 2015 and 2020. The production data is normalized for the lateral length. You can find that based on this metric, the best results were obtained by the 2016 vintage wells. These 2,232 wells recovered 37 thousand barrels of oil per thousand feet of lateral length, in the first 4 years on production. A small deterioration in these curves is observable for newer wells. Of course, these are average results with large deviations between operators and areas.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which will release June production data in the coming days (which will be immediately available in our subscription services).

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For these presentations, we used data gathered from the sources listed below.

• FracFocus.org
• Arkansas Oil & Gas Commission
• Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Similar to Texas, lease/unit production is allocated over wells in order to estimate their individual production histories.
• Montana Board of Oil and Gas
• New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission
• North Dakota Department of Natural Resources
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources
• Oklahoma Corporation Commission – Oil & Gas Division
• Oklahoma Tax Commission
• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
• Texas Railroad Commission. Individual well production is estimated through the allocation of lease production data over the wells in a lease, and from pending lease production data.
• Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining
• Automated Geographic Reference Center of Utah.
• West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
• West Virginia Geological & Economic Survey
• Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission

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.