US – update through March 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 144,661 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through March. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as it hasn’t reported Q1 production data yet.

Total production

March US tight oil production more than made up for the 1 million b/d loss in February, and at 7.1 million b/d was slightly higher than the January level. Natural gas production (excl. West Virginia) also recovered by 6 Bcf/d, and was at 73.6 Bcf/d just 3% below the historical peak in November 2019 (76.1 Bcf/d).

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count in the Lower 48 has climbed to 425 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes). At this level, and assuming no changes in drilling or well productivity,  current output can be roughly maintained, as is visualized in our Supply Projection dashboard:

The contribution from wells from each year is nicely visible here. Given that operators may reduce the DUC count in these months, and efficiencies may have slightly increased, this picture probably somewhat underestimates current and future production.

Permit activity

Despite rising oil & gas prices, permit activity is still close to the lowest level in the last decade:

This image, taken from Permit Activity dashboard, reveals that in Q2 this year only 2,965 permits for new horizontal wells were approved in the 10 states shown on the map, which was even lower than in the 2 quarters earlier.

Obviously, most of these new permits(1,669)  were approved in the Permian Basin:

EOG was with 333 newly approved permits in Q2, including 266 in the Permian, well above the rest.

Top operators

The 10 largest tight oil operators are displayed in the final overview (“Top operators”). All these operators saw a significant boost in production in March. ConocoPhillips was only 20 thousand b/d below EOG, the number 1, despite operating 3.2 thousand fewer horizontal wells.

Finally

Yesterday we were happy to announce that HITE Hedge Asset Management choose ShaleProfile for all their data and analytics needs on US tight oil & gas.

If you want to have easy access to the most up-to-date production, completion and permit data, together with our own production forecasts on well level, check out our improved ShaleProfile Data service. This also includes a real-time data API for those who wish to automate everything.

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which has just released May production data (already available in our subscription services). Texas also just released May production data for most wells.

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.