US – update through January 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 142,897 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through December. West Virginia and Ohio are deselected in most dashboards, as they haven’t reported January production data yet.

I am excited to announce that we just released an add-on to our data subscription. Users can now also access all well permits, directional survey data (10 million+ records!)  and 20-year production forecasts on well level. More info, including a description and a free sample can be found here:  ShaleProfile Data plan.

Total production

US tight oil production fell by less than 1% in January m-o-m, to 6.9 million b/d (after upcoming revisions, hz. wells only). Tight gas output continued its upward trend since last May, although it is still below the March 2020 high (toggle Product to gas to see this).

Well performance

In the “Well quality” tab, you’ll find that in the major tight oil basins well productivity (on an unnormalized basis) has still increased in recent years, on average, and 2020 was no exception.

In the 3 largest tight gas basins (Marcellus, Haynesville, Utica), well performance increased even more:

The chart on the right shows that the ~1,400 horizontal wells that came online in these basins in 2020 are on track to recover on average over 4 Bcf of natural gas in the first 12 months, a new record.

Top operators

The 8 largest tight oil operators are displayed in the final overview (“Top operators”). Several major deals closed in January, so the ranking changed quite a bit. ConocoPhillips is now with half a million b/d only 100 thousand b/d behind EOG. Occidental, which for a short while last year was the number 1, has now fallen to the 4th position, behind Pioneer Natural Resources.

Diamondback, the number 7 in this list, was in the news this week as it announced the sale of its Bakken assets to Oasis. Here a quick view on those assets using dashboards from ShaleProfile Analytics:

Diamondback, the number 7 in this list, was in the news this week as it announced the sale of its Bakken assets to Oasis. Here a quick view on those assets using dashboards from ShaleProfile Analytics:

Its well positions are shown on the left side, and includes 406 completed wells and 4 DUCs. On the right you can see that the performance of all these (formerly QEP) wells hasn’t improved since 2010, as measured by their EUR trajectories,  although initial production rates have increased. The 2 wells that came online in 2020 did have an excellent start though, as they recovered 250 thousand barrels each in just 8 months.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which has released March production data, most of which will be ready in our services later today.

Check out our new data subscription improvements here : https://shaleprofile.com/plans/data/

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.