US Oil and Gas Production – update through June 2017

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from 77,054 horizontal wells in 10 US states, through June. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 7.1 Gbo and 75.3 Tcf.

[Originally I planned to post the latest data for North Dakota, but as it was only partially released (not in the desired format yet), I decided to publish the latest data for all covered US states instead.]

Once revision data for the last couple of months is in, I expect to see that oil production from these wells has crossed the 4 million barrels per day level again. As you can see from the colored regions, the contribution from the ~10k wells that started production since early last year constituted about half of this result. The output of the 65+ thousand horizontal wells that started before 2016 fell to just under 2 million bo/d in June, which means that the average production rate of these wells is now 30 bo/d. That however also includes a significant number of wells from the major gas basins (Appalachia & Haynesville).

If you switch “product” to gas, you’ll notice that excluding West Virginia (which only has data through end of 2016), gas production from the wells shown here rose to over 40 Bcf/day, for the first time. This is more than half of the total gas production in the US (~73 Bcf/day in June, according to the EIA).

In the “Well quality” tab the average production curves for all the horizontal wells in the shale oil basins are shown, by the year in which production started. The performance of wells that started this year is so far quite similar to that of the wells a year earlier.

Clearly leading in operated oil production volume, EOG is responsible for 10% of the total oil production (~400 kbo/d), as shown in the “Top operators” overview.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows the clear relationship between cumulative production, and production rates, over time. The rather straight curves on this semi-log plot indicate an average hyperbolic decline with a b-factor of close to 1 (= harmonic decline). This allows anybody to make a reasonable estimate of the ultimate recovery of these wells, at a certain economic limit.

On the Get the Data the latest production data is again available. The new US data packages now also contain text files, so that they can be easily imported in any database of your preference.

Early next week I will have a post with the August production from North Dakota.

Production data is subject to, typically upward, revisions, especially for the last few months in Texas. For these presentations, I used data gathered from the sources listed below.

• FracFocus.org
• Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Similar like in Texas, lease production is allocated over individual wells in order to estimate the well production history.
• Montana Board of Oil and Gas
• New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission
• North Dakota Department of Natural Resources
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources
• 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. Actual production data from individual well tests, in combination with several other data sources, is used to improve the accuracy of this allocation algorithm.
• West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
• West Virginia Geological & Economical 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.