US – update through October 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 140,9179 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through October. Ohio & West Virginia are excluded from most overviews as these states did not yet publish production data for October.

Total production

US tight oil production was basically unchanged in October, at nearly 7.0 million bo/d. Over 500 horizontal wells came online for the month, a higher number than in the preceding 5 months, but far lower than the more than 1,000 wells we saw in a typical month in 2019.

Supply Projection

Last month, another 30 rigs returned to the fields to drill horizontal wells according to the Baker Hughes rig count. The rig count has been growing at this pace for several months now, which has materially changed our outlook, as can be viewed in our Supply Projection dashboard. We expect that current production level can now almost be sustained, especially if rig efficiency has improved in the past few months, which will take some time to show up in the data, and/or if the rig additions continue for a few more months.

Well productivity

Average well performance in the tight oil basins was slightly up in 2020, as you can find in the “Well quality”tab. Undoubtedly, high-grading was a major factor behind that.

Top operators

The 10 largest operators are visualized in the last overview (“Top operators”). Occidental & Marathon showed the biggest declines since Q1 2020, at just over 30%. Both operators brought completion activity to an almost complete halt in Q2 & Q3 last year. Diamondback saw a big increase through its acquisition of QEP. Its acquisition of Guidon will close later this month.

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 year in which production started.

The impact of the shut-ins last year is clearly visible in the older vintages.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which will release complete production data for December in the coming days (which will be immediately available in our subscription services).

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.