US – update through November 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 140,745 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through November. Ohio & West Virginia are excluded from most overviews as these states did not yet publish production data for October & November.

Total production

US tight oil production continued to hover at a level close to 7.0 million bo/d in November, for the 5th consecutive month. Natural gas did a little better, as it slightly rose to above 65 Bcf/d. which was only 3 Bcf/d below the record set in March.

Supply Projection

Although the horizontal rig count increased again last month to 357 rigs in the lower 48 (according to the Baker Hughes rig count), the pace has slowed down to 16, only half compared with previous months.  Our Supply Projection dashboard, which always shows the latest outlook for tight oil & gas, assuming no further changes in the horizontal rig count and productivity, now looks as follows:

It reveals that further steep declines in tight oil & gas are unlikely, unless the rig count starts dropping again. If rig efficiency has increased somewhat in the last several months, as seems likely, this projection probably slightly even underestimates upcoming supply.

Top operators

The 20 largest tight oil operators are visualized in the last overview (“Top operators”). ConocoPhillips, Pioneer Natural Resources, Diamondback and Chevron also saw significant jumps in output as several acquisitions closed. Other M&A activity will soon be reflected as well. Occidental showed the steepest decline among these producers, as it completed fewer than half the number of wells than in 2019.

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 quarter in which production started.

The impact of the shut-ins last year is clearly visible in these quarterly vintages, and that the lasting effect might be limited, at least for younger wells. If you select the Q3 2020 vintage, you can see that those wells had the best average initial performance so far, but the thin line already highlights that the number of wells (995), was also lower than many other vintages.

Permit activity

Our Permit activity dashboard now covers the 10 states in which 99%+ of all the horizontal drilling in the US takes place:

The chart on the right shows the number of permits for horizontal wells over time, by quarter and by status of the permit. In Q2 2020, fewer than 2,300 permits were approved, close to the decade-low in 2016 Q2 (2,164), but the number has been rising since. In the first 2 months of this year 1,685 permits were approved. The interactive version of this dashboard allows you to easily figure out which operators submitted these permits and where the permitted locations are.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which will release production data for January in the coming days. After that we follow-up with one on the Haynesville Basin, which is now the 2nd most active basin in the US, after the Permian, based on drilling activity.

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.