US - update through Octobre 2019

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Entry posted by shaleprofile · February 4, 2020

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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 119,057 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through October 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 12.6 billion bbl and 142 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

Since the start of 2019, oil production in the 10 selected states grew steadily to 7.4 million bo/d in October. After revisions another 100 kbo/d or so should be added. Note that due to the omission of Ohio, these numbers are not comparable to the last update. This marks a growth rate of ~0.9 million bo/d y-o-y, still significant, but only a little more than half the rate seen a year earlier (1.6 million bo/d).

Completion numbers are slightly down through October compared with the year before (9,344 vs 10,073).

The next tab (“Well quality”) visualizes how well performance has changed over time in the major tight oil basins. There were significant improvements every year from 2013 to 2016 as completion designs advanced. In the last 3 years the rate of productivity improvements has markedly slowed, probably due to a mix of better completions but tighter well spacing.

It took the 7,000 wells that commenced production in 2012 7 years to recover 150 thousand barrels of oil, on average (see the bottom chart). Newer wells recover that amount in less than 18 months.

Most of the leading shale operators slowed production growth in 2019 (see “Top operators”). Exxon Mobil was a clear exception, as it doubled output in just 1.5 years.

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.

You can find here that the wells which began production between 2010 and 2012 are nowadays near a production rate of 20 bo/d and that they have recovered so far just over 150 thousand barrels of oil, on average. Newer wells are on a trajectory to do about double that amount (they also peaked at over double the rate).

The following graph, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics, shows how lateral lengths and proppants have changed in the previous 6 years:

Lateral lengths and proppant loadings over time. All tight basins.

Laterals grew by almost 50%, while proppant loadings more than tripled, on average. Of course there are major differences between basins and operators, which all can be analyzed in our service.

We were happy to find that the JPT wrote an interesting article about the behavior of shale wells after more than 5 years on production, supported by our analytics service: Life After 5: How Tight-Oil Wells Grow Old

We are in Houston this week to visit friends and customers, and to show our latest work at the Nape summit on Thursday and Friday. Using a mix of traditional decline methods, machine learning and statistics, we are now able to create 20-year forecasts for most of the horizontal wells in the US. Visit our booth (#3019) to see how that looks for the areas where you are interested in.

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota.

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