US – update through November 2019

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 120,328 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through November 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 12.9 billion bbl and 145 Tcf of natural gas. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as its production data is only up-to-date through September. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

Oil production from these wells set another record in November, at over 7.6 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). The over 10 thousand horizontal wells that came online in 2019 contributed half of this supply (3.8 million bo/d), as is visualized by the dark blue area in the graph above.

Gas production also set a new high (toggle product to ‘Gas’ to see this), at just over 68 Bcf/d. Because natural gas production declines slower than oil, you’ll note that for this product the 2019 wells only contributed about 1/3rd of supply in November.

Well performance in the oil basins edged higher  in 2019 (“Well quality” tab), but not by as much as would be expected from the average increase in lateral lengths alone.

The output of the 10 largest operators can be found in the final tab (“Top operators”).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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.

More recent and granular data can be obtained if you change the “Show wells by” selection to the quarter in which these wells began production. The wells from the 3rd quarter last year had the highest initial productivity so far.

In the major tight oil basins, about 2 barrels of water are produced together with each barrel of oil, on average. In the following dashboard, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics, we can analyze the water production from all the horizontal wells:

The map on the left side shows the location of all horizontal wells and they are colored by the water/oil ratio in the most recent month (more red is more water). As you can see, most water is produced in the Permian, followed by the Bakken.

The top-right chart shows the total oil & water production from these wells, as well as the average water/oil ratio (“WOR”, in yellow, right-hand side axis).

The bottom-right chart displays the water/oil ratio by months on production, colored by vintage. Here you can see that newer wells produce more water, on average (one obvious reason is the shift towards the Permian).

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which just released January production data for most wells (now available in our subscription services). We also aim to finish a new dashboard on gas flaring this week, which I hope to share then.

Production data is subject to revisions. 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
• 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.