This interactive presentation contains the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 5,628 horizontal wells in the Haynesville that started producing from 2007, through May 2020. The last time we had a separate post on this basin was over a year ago. But we noticed that drilling activity is relatively high in this basin (even higher than in the Marcellus!), and it is the only major US shale basin for which we predict output growth, based on current activity levels.

Our thoughts are with the residents of this area and south of it, which is being hit at the moment by hurricane Laura.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

Total production

Natural gas production came in close to 11 Bcf/d in May (after upcoming revisions), more than double the level compared with 4 years earlier, and far above the earlier peak set in 2011. What happened in the last 4 years?

Well productivity

As you can find in the “Well quality” tab, well productivity has dramatically increased since 2015. Recently completed wells are on track to recover more than 7 Bcf of natural gas in the first 3 years on production (see the bottom chart), which is double the amount that wells before 2015 managed. How was that made possible?

Completion designs have changed a lot in these years. Laterals in the Haynesville are up from 6,000 to almost 8,000 feet, while proppant loadings have roughly tripled to about 30 million pounds per completion:

Completion designs in the Haynesville, image from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional)

Supply Projection dashboard

There were 6 more rigs drilling horizontal wells in the Haynesville than in the Marcellus Basin (32 vs 26) as of last week (according to the Baker Hughes rig count). About 2/3rd of the activity is on the Louisiana side of the play (from our publicly available  Supply Projection dashboard😞

Tight gas outlook for the Haynesville, based on current drilling activity and productivity

As the image shows, at the current drilling & completion rate, output may grow steadily over time, even though also here the rig count is just half of what it was early last year.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the leading 5 natural gas producers in the Haynesville can be seen. Chesapeake and BP were the only major operators that did not grow output in the past year.

The well performance of all operators can be easily compared within our ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional) service:

On the right side you can see all the operators with at least 10 operated wells, ranked by the average cumulative natural gas recovered by their wells in the first 2 years. On the map all wells are shown, colored by the same metric.

By this measure, Goodrich Petroleum and Vine are in the lead. Their wells recovered over 4 Bcf of natural gas in the first 2 years on production, on average.

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Recovery” overview reveals the relationship between gas production rates and cumulative gas production, averaged for all horizontal wells that began production in a particular year.

Unfortunately for the operators here, these curves are concave downward, which indicates a hyperbolic decline with a b-factor lower than 1.

Finally

Next week we will have a post on all covered states in the US.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• The Louisiana Department of Natural Resources
• Texas RRC. Production data is provided on lease level. Individual well production data is estimated from a range of data sources, including regular well tests, and pending lease reports.
• FracFocus.org

Visit our blog to read the full post and use the interactive dashboards to gain more insight: https://bit.ly/34yJUGC

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