US Shale Oil Production Chart – update through September 2016

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 66272 horizontal wells in 8 US states, through September. Cumulative oil production from these wells reached 6.0 Gbo, while cumulative gas production topped 49.4 TCF.

The overview shows that in the first 9 months of 2016, oil production from wells that started production before 2016 declined with roughly 1.5 million bo/d, while new production added 1 million bo/d. This means that over this period about 2/3rd of the decline was covered with new production.

The situation for gas was rather different, as gas production from these wells has kept relatively steady around a level of 35 BCF/d. September does show a 2016 low for gas production, which may remain the case after revisions have come in.

The “Well quality” tab gives an overview of how the production profiles of all these wells has changed over the years. There is a very clear shift to ever higher initial production, while the production decline afterwards is steeper compared with wells before 2011. Those early wells were mostly Bakken wells in Montana and North Dakota, which do display slower declines in oil production. In this overview, I’ve selected only the basins where oil production is dominant, so if you wish to look at the other areas, like the Appalachia basin, please update the “basin” selection.

We can see in the last tab (“Top operators”) that the largest operators all showed some decline in total oil production in the first 9 months of 2016.

The new ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview provides another clear view on how production profiles have changed, and an indication of what that means for the average recovery from these wells.

The thickness of the curves resembles the number of wells that started in that period. Also here I’ve selected the main oil basins.

In the next tab (“Cumulative production ranking”), I’ve ranked all counties based on their cumulative production. McKenzie and Mountrail, both in North Dakota, are clearly on top, but Karnes in the Eagle Ford was producing oil at a higher level in September than Mountrail, as the tooltips show.

If you switch to gas in this overview, you’ll see that Susquehanna county in Pennsylvania, is clearly the leader in cumulative gas production.

Once the North Dakota Industrial Commission has released November production data (I expect around coming Friday), I will post another update on North Dakota.

Production data is subject to revisions, especially for the last few months in Texas. For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• 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. Well production profiles are estimated from well status & lease production data, as individual well production data is not provided.
• Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentation has 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.