Enno Peters
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 all 2060 horizontal wells in West Virginia that started production since 2010, through December 2016.
This is the first time that I have a post on West Virginia, making it the 10th state for which I’ve shown oil & gas production from individual horizontal wells. West Virginia releases production data once a year, and 2016 production data was made available last week, which is included in the data shown here. As West Virginia is part of the Appalachian basin, also production data for Ohio and Pennsylvania are available in these presentation, but in most overviews they are not selected. If you wish to see them, just use the “Basin” selection available in each overview.
As you can see in the above overview, gas production rose each year since 2010, and ended 2016 close to 3.5 Bcf/d. Basically all these wells are focussed on gas, as associated oil (including condensate) & NGL is just 25 kbo/d.
In the “Well quality” tab, the production profiles of all these wells can be seen. Also in this basin, the yearly trend of increasing well performance is clearly visible.
In 2015 and 2016 the number of new well completions dropped however, while drilling slowed even faster. This caused a drop in drilled & uncompleted wells (DUCs), although since September 2016 drilling activities have increased again. These trends can be seen in the “Well status” tab, with the help of the “Show well statuses” selection available there.
The last tab (“Top operators”), shows that Antero Resources, and EQT are the leading operators in this state.
The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:
This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows how all these horizontal wells are heading towards their ultimate gas recovery. On average, the wells that started in 2014, are at 2.1 Bcf cumulative production after 25 months on production, with a production rate of just below 2000 Mcf/d.
The 2nd tab (“Cumulative production ranking”), shows the ranking of all these 2060 wells, based on cumulative production. As you can see, the best 2 wells have topped 7 Bcf.
On the maps shown in the 3rd & 6th tab, I’ve also selected Pennsylvania & Ohio. You can nicely see in those overviews where exactly the wells are clustered in the Appalachian basin, and where the most productive areas are.
If you are interested in the underlying data yourself, I’ve just added the data used in this presentation to the Get the Data page where it is available for purchase.
On Thursday I will also have a post on the Appalachian basin, showing production data for Pennsylvania & Ohio through March 2017.
For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:
- West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
- West Virginia Geological & Economical Survey
- FracFocus.org
====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.
News, trends and data for the US upstream industry
Novi Energy Newsletter
2 Comments
Enno
This is absolutely outstanding work presenting the West Virginia data.
There is so much difference here from either Pennsylvania or the Ohio Utica that clearly identifiable results will be immensely helpful to all observers.
You may have seen from the oilpro site that a deeper understanding of your vast data will greatly assist people in understanding what is going on.
Couple of points …
The acquisition of Rice by EQT will have huge – upside for production – consequences.
The numbers for WV will never rival Susquehanna or Bradford counties, but their very high liquid content (over 50% NGLs is common) will support strong economic returns.
The takeaway pipelines to Texas and Marcus Hook are large and more capacity is coming online.
An entirely new industry – shipping liquefied ethane in bulk – is barely a year old and is now supported by 3 dozen large, newly built for purpose ships.
WV production will play a large role here.
There are ongoing legal and legislative battles in the WV state legislature that has had a somewhat inhibiting impact on development.
Once again, great work, Enno.
Hopefully you will reap the benefits from all your time and efforts.
I appreciate it Gerard, thanks!
> The numbers for WV will never rival Susquehanna or Bradford counties, but their very high liquid content (over 50% NGLs is common) will support strong economic returns.
WV indeed reports NGL separately (before 2016 it was reported as condensate, and it is still reported in barrels). I’ve added these NGL numbers to the oil numbers. About 25% of the overall oil shown here was therefore actually reported as NGL. It still doesn’t seem like a large amount; about 7 thousand ‘barrels of NGL’ per day in the whole state.