These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 123,933 horizontal wells in 11 US states, through September. Oklahoma & West Virginia are excluded as these states did not yet publish complete production data for Q3.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

Total production

US tight oil production was flat m-o-m in September at 7.0 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions, including estimates for Oklahoma). Again some 1,500 horizontal wells that were temporarily shut-in came back online, which helped stem the underlying decline.

Supply Projection

Our outlook for tight oil & gas production has improved, as 30 rigs were added in each of the last 2 months (to 312 as of last week, according to the Baker Hughes rig count). But this level is still not enough to maintain current production:

Tight oil outlook at current drilling activity and well/rig productivity

The screenshot above was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard, which is also available in the Ultimate version of ShaleProfile Analytics. It shows that since November 2019 about 2 million b/d of output has been lost, and that more than another 1 million b/d will not be replaced if drilling activity does not pick up further.

Tight gas output is also expected to fall at current activity levels, but somewhat less so (switch “Product” to gas to see that).

Top operators

The 10 largest operators are visualized in the last overview (“Top operators”). Of these, only Exxon Mobil set a new output record in September.

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.

You can see how average well productivity has improved in the last 10 years, but also that the rate of improvements has slowed down since 2017. The impact of the recent shut-ins also starts to become visible now in the older vintages. I do expect that in the coming months we’ll see a partial rebound in the production profiles for these wells (which already is clear if you group the wells by quarter or month of first production).

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which already has released November production data (available in our subscription services). It reported a m-o-m decline of below 1%.

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

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