US Shale Oil Production by State – update through May 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 76,162 horizontal wells in 10 US states, through May. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 7.0 Gbo and 73.9 Tcf.

In the first 5 months of this year, the ~2300 wells that have been brought online this year contributed more new oil production than the ~2750 wells that were put on production in the same period last year (816 kbo/d vs 809 kbo/d based on preliminary data). This improvement in well productivity has been an important explanation behind the rising output from shale wells in 2017 so far. As the above graph shows, production from these new wells in May was already higher than the output from the 10k+ wells that started production in 2015.

In the “Well quality” tab I have preselected the major shale oil basins, and the changes in average well productivity over the past decade can be easily seen.

The “Well status” tab shows the status of all these wells over time. Although the number of inactive horizontal wells has now risen to over 4000, only a small number (~650) have been plugged so far.

The last overview shows that EOG has increased its operated output by more than 10% over the preceding year.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview also shows the steady increases in average well productivity in the major shale oil basins in recent years. Where a typical 2011 well is now at a production rate of below 30 bo/d, with cumulative production of ~140 kbo, newer wells are on a path to a far higher recovery.

In the coming 2 days the Get the Data page will be updated again, and the “US Unlimited” option will become available. This data package contains not only horizontal well & production, completion & location data, but also the details behind the allocation process for Texas and Louisiana, including all the individual well tests.

On Thursday I plan to have a new post on the Appalachian basin, with recent production data from Pennsylvania and Ohio.

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 following 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, together with several other 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.