US - update through September 2019

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Entry posted by shaleprofile · January 7, 2020

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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 117,989 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through September 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 12.4 billion bbl and 140 Tcf of natural gas. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as its production data is less current. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

Even preliminary production data has September oil production in all these states at a new record, at over 7.3 million bo/d. After upcoming revisions, I expect it to eventually settle at around 7.5 million bo/d. These figures are somewhat higher than the previous US update, as we are now able to include more production data for recently completed wells in New Mexico, and Ohio is also up-to-date.

At 7.5 million bo/d, the y-o-y growth was 0.9 million bo/d. Although high, this is only half of the increase in the year before (1.8 million bo/d in the twelve months through September 2018).

The production profiles for all these horizontal wells can be viewed in the “Well quality” tab, where the major tight oil basins are preselected. It shows that average initial well productivity improved every year in the past decade. However, as highlighted in previous posts, no improvements are seen after 2016, when you normalize production data by lateral length (possible only in our ShaleProfile Analytics service).

The largest operators (based on output in the previous 12 months) can be found in the final tab (“Top operators”). Exxon Mobil is now also in the list, and immediately jumped to the 2nd spot. About 2/3rd of its unconventional production comes from the Permian, where it has significantly ramped up operations.

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.

The over 10,000 wells that began production in these plays in 2018 recovered on average 121 thousand barrels of oil, in the first 10 months on production. This is 8% more than the wells did that began production a year earlier, over the same time frame. Lateral lengths increased by 6%, and proppant loadings by 12%, on average, between those years.

Finally, I wanted to share the following graph (from our advanced analytics service), which displays how oil production from horizontal wells has developed in the top 6 states, through September 2019:

It highlights the enormous rise in production from Texas, which is now good for more than half of total output. But since early 2017, the percentage growth rate was even higher in New Mexico.

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which just made November production data available in their subscription service (showing a preliminary minor drop in output). This was immediately made available for our subscribers as well.

Production data is subject to revisions. 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
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