US – update through July 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 138,315 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through July. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 15.4 billion bbl and 174 Tcf of natural gas. Ohio and West Virginia are excluded from most overviews, as they have not yet reported July production data.

Total production

US tight oil production regained again some lost ground in July, increasing by about 0.4 million to 6.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). Tight gas output also climbed, but with a relatively smaller amount (switch product to gas). It of course also fell less steep earlier this year.

Supply Projection dashboard

We expect to see another increase in August, but further gains are unlikely after that. Although the 242 rigs drilling horizontal wells as of last week (according to the Baker Hughes rig count) is 9% higher than a month ago, it is not yet sufficient to keep production from falling by itself:

The screenshot above was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard; assuming no further changes in rig count and productivity, we project that tight oil supply would fall to below 4 million bo/d by the end of the decade.

In a scenario where the rig count would keep increasing by 5% each month until the end of next year (reaching 505) and stay there, the outlook would be rather different, but still not reaching the former peak:

This is of course simply a hypothetical case. In our ShaleProfile Analytics service (Ultimate), you can easily run your own scenarios and save them.

Top operators

The 15 largest operators are listed in the last overview (“Top operators”). Selecting an operator in the legend will highlight its production curve and well locations. There is a lot of consolidation happening in the industry and almost half of these companies are in M&A situations (Pioneer, Concho, Devon, ConocoPhillips, WPX, Chevron and Noble Energy). Who else will follow?

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.

You will see more recent data (and some steep declines at the tails) if you group these wells by quarter of first production instead.

Finally

We have started to expand outside US Shale. Professional & Ultimate subscribers are now able to see offshore oil & gas production data in the US Gulf of Mexico and in Brazil. These two areas are good for almost 5 million barrels of oil per day. Other areas will be included in the coming weeks/months.

In two weeks we will be back with a new post on North Dakota, which will release September production data in the coming days.

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.