US – update through February 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 143,674 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through February. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as it hasn’t reported February production data yet. Ohio, which did just reported Q1 2021 production, is included this time.

Total production

US tight oil production fell by 1 million b/d to 6 million b/d in February, the lowest level in 3 years, as cold winter weather affected production in several states. This was just a blip, and based on preliminary data we expect production to have fully recovered in March.

Supply Projection

With the horizontal rig count now having recovered to well over 400 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes), current output can be almost sustained, as is visualized in our Supply Projection dashboard:

More than half of these rigs can be found in the Permian basin, which is the only major tight oil basin that can grow at this level of activity.

Completion design

After several years of increases in lateral lengths and proppant loadings, 2020 was no exception:

In 2020, horizontal wells in the US were frac’ed with over 17 million pounds of proppants, while lateral lengths increased to about 9 thousand feet. Source: our Lateral lengths & Proppants Dashboard.

Top operators

The 15 largest tight oil operators are displayed in the final overview (“Top operators”). All these operators saw the impact of the extreme weather on their production in February. Pioneer Natural Resources lost 100 thousand b/d during the month.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which has just released April production data, most of which is already in our subscription services.

If you want to have access to the most up-to-date production and completion data, check out our improved ShaleProfile Data service.

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.