This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 112,550 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through April 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 11.3 billion bbl and 129.5 million Tcf. West Virginia and Ohio are deselected in most dashboards, as they have a greater reporting lag. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

In the comments section at the bottom of this post, I will comment on some recent articles that questioned whether well productivity is stalling in the Permian.

Oil production from horizontal wells in these states grew to close to 7 million bo/d in April (after upcoming revisions), setting a new record. That would represent a y-o-y growth of 1.3 million bo/d, but the rate at which production is increasing has slowed down since the end of last year.

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. Still, the wells that began production last year are on track to recover 132 thousand barrels of oil in the first year on production, on average, which is 9 thousand barrels of oil more than the 2017 vintage.

The final tab lists the top 5 operators in these tight basins. EOG is still comfortably in the lead with over 600,000 bo/d of production in April.

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.

Also here you can see that well productivity increased significantly over the years, and is still going up, although the rate of growth is going down. But what if you normalize for the lateral length, which has increased in almost all of the basins?

The following screenshot shows what that looks like. It was created in our ShaleProfile Analytics service (Professional), which is available for just $279/month.

Well productivity for 60 thousand horizontal oil wells on a normalized basis.

Here you can also find these “Ultimate recovery profiles”, with almost 60,000 horizontal oil wells selected in all the major tight oil basins. It reveals that based on this normalized metric and depending on exactly where and how you measure, well performance barely increased in the 2016-2018 time frame. Here below in the comments section we will do a similar exercise for the Permian.

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which will soon release June production data.

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

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