Pennsylvania – update through October 2019

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Entry posted by shaleprofile · December 18, 2019

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This interactive presentation contains the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 9,319 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through October.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

October gas production came in at 18.7 Bcf/d, slightly higher than in the previous month, and again setting a new all-time high. But the horizontal rig count is down by almost 60% since the start of the year and production growth is stalling.

Well performance is still good, but almost unchanged from 2 years ago (see the “Well quality” tab). Nowadays, wells recover over 3 Bcf of natural gas in the first year on production, on average.

The DUC count is slowly declining, as you will find in the “Well status” overview, after selecting this status (“2. DUC”). A good portion of this DUC count is normal Work-In-Progress inventory.

Chevron recently indicated that it will write down its assets in this basin by a very significant amount: Chevron expects $10 billion-$11 billion charge in fourth quarter. Its natural gas output has fallen to just 0.3 Bcf/d in October (select this operator in the graph above to see this).

As we can see in the “Productivity ranking” dashboard, available in our analytics service, Chevron’s well performance was rather mediocre in this area:

On the left side you can find the location of all the horizontal wells in Ohio and Pennsylvania, colored by the amount of cumulative gas recovered in the first 2 years. On the right side, all the major operators (>= 10 operated wells) are ranked based on the same metric. As the tooltip shows, Chevron ranked just 24 in this list, as its wells recovered on average about 70% less than the number 1, Cabot.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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

We plan to have a new post on the Permian later this week, followed by one on the Eagle Ford just before Christmas. Ohio just released Q3 production data, which is already available in our subscription services.

Production data is subject to revisions. For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources: