US – update through September 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 117,989 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through September 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 12.4 billion bbl and 140 Tcf of natural gas. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as its production data is less current. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

Even preliminary production data has September oil production in all these states at a new record, at over 7.3 million bo/d. After upcoming revisions, I expect it to finally come in at around 7.5 million bo/d. These figures are somewhat higher than the previous US update, as we are now able to include more production data for recently completed wells in New Mexico, and Ohio is also up-to-date.

At 7.5 million bo/d, the y-o-y growth was 0.9 million bo/d. Although high, this is only half of the increase in the year before (1.8 million bo/d in the twelve months through September 2018).

The production profiles for all these horizontal wells can be viewed in the “Well quality” tab, where the major tight oil basins are preselected. It shows that average initial well productivity improved every year in the past decade. However, as highlighted in previous posts, no improvements are seen after 2016, when you normalize production data by lateral length (possible only in our ShaleProfile Analytics service).

The largest operators (based on output in the previous 12 months) can be found in the final tab (“Top operators”). Exxon Mobil is now also in the list, and immediately jumped to the 2nd spot. About 2/3rd of its unconventional production comes from the Permian, where it has significantly ramped up operations.

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.

The over 10,000 wells that began production in these plays in 2018 recovered on average 121 thousand barrels of oil, in the first 10 months on production. This is 8% more than the wells did that began a year earlier, over that time frame. Lateral lengths increased by 6%, and proppant loadings by 12%, on average, between those years.

Finally, I wanted to share the following graph (from our advanced analytics service), which displays how oil production from horizontal wells has developed in the top 6 states, through September 2019:

It highlights the enormous rise in production from Texas, which is now good for more than half of total output. But since early 2017, the percentage growth rate was even higher in New Mexico.

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which just made November production data available in their subscription service (showing a preliminary minor drop in output). This was immediately made available for our subscribers as well.

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.