US – update through January 2020

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 133,878 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through January 2020. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 14.0 billion bbl and 160 Tcf of natural gas. Ohio and West Virginia are disabled in several views, as their production data for January was not yet reported.

Total production

Oil production from these wells started the year with a minor drop m-o-m, as several states reported a decline. Still, y-o-y growth in January was about 0.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions).

Reeves County in the Delaware Basin (TX) recently overtook McKenzie in North Dakota in terms of daily oil production, although Lea County (NM), also in the Delaware Basin, is catching up quickly.

Supply Projection dashboard

Obviously, the situation radically changed 2 months ago and drilling activity is now only half the level in January. Last week 51 fewer rigs were drilling horizontal wells , according to the Baker Hughes rig count. In our publicly available Supply Projection dashboard we found that long-term oil & gas output dropped by 0.7 million bo/d and 4.3 Bcf/d, after this data became available.

If nothing else changes (unlikely), tight oil production will decline to a level of about 6 million bo/d from here:

You can use the parameters in this dashboard to change the future rig count and rig/well productivity, in order to make your own projections. If you missed our webinar on this dashboard, you can still find a recording here: Supply Projection webinar (YouTube)

Top operators

Last week we finished our M&A mapping capability. Now M&A transactions are correctly represented in our services. For example, Occidental’s acquisition of Anadarko is now reflected in the “Top operators” overview, and it is now clearly the number 2 tight oil operator, after EOG. If you believe we have missed an acquisition, just let us know and we’ll include it!

Advanced Insights

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows the relationship between production rates and cumulative production over time. The oil basins are preselected and the wells are grouped by the year in which production started. More recent and granular data can be seen if you group the wells by quarter or month of first production.

Finally

Later this week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which just released March production data for almost all wells (available already 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.