US - update through March 2019

Entry posted by shaleprofile · July 18, 2019

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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 111,702 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through March 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 11.1 Gbo and 128 Tcf. Arkansas, which we’ve recently added to our data platform, is included as well. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as it has a greater reporting lag for many horizontal wells. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

Shale oil production in these states grew by 1.5 million bo/d last year to over 6.8 million bo/d, as is visible in the graph above. Although preliminary data has the first few months of 2019 down a little, I expect that March set another record, after revisions.

There are some more incredible numbers; the 12 thousand wells that were completed last year contributed almost 4 million bo/d to this total in December (visible in the tooltip on the light-blue area). But their initial decline was steep, and these wells were ‘only’ producing 3 million bo/d in March this year. In order to maintain the current production level, every month a decline of about 350 thousand bo/d has to be filled.

Gas production from these wells has grown steadily, and in March topped 61 Bcf/d (switch ‘Product’ to gas).

In the “Well quality” tab the production profiles of all the horizontal wells in the major tight oil basins are selected. After many years of major improvements in well productivity, there appears to be a slow-down in the last 2 years. The wells that started production last year are on a trajectory to recover less than 10% more in the first 12 months, on average, than the wells that began in 2017.

The final tab lists the top 5 operators in these basins. EOG operated more than 600,000 bo/d of capacity in March, more than double the number 2.

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.

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which has just released May production data. Our data and analytics subscribers can now access this data in our services.

Production data is subject to revisions. For these presentations, I 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 as in 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