US - update through August 2019

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Entry posted by shaleprofile · December 4, 2019

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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 116,815 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through August 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 12.2 billion bbl and 137 Tcf of natural gas. Ohio and West Virginia are deselected in most dashboards, as their production data is less current. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

Although the horizontal rig count has fallen by 26% since the start of this year (from 941 to 695 last week), oil output in August from horizontal wells still climbed to over 7.1 million bo/d. In the graph above you can find that the contribution from wells that began production since 2018 was just over 2/3rd of the total in August. This is a very similar finding as Bloomberg made in this article yesterday: Faded Texas Oil Field Offers Austerity Lesson for U.S. Shale.

The production profiles for all these horizontal wells can be viewed in the “Well quality” tab, where the major tight oil basins are preselected. The rate of improvement in well productivity has steadily slowed since 2016. After selecting only oil wells and normalizing for the increase in lateral length (possible only in our ShaleProfile Analytics service), we see no improvements in initial well results in the past 3 years, on average.

For some operators we even find a clear deterioration in average well performance, such as EOG. It is still clearly the leader in US shale though, as is visualized in the final tab (“Top operators”).

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 set a new production record in October (data for this month is already available in our subscription 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 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
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