Haynesville (LA): After several years of stagnant production, gas production rose by 50% in 2017

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Haynesville (LA) – update through February 2018

This article contains still images from interactive dashboards available on the blog post. To follow the instructions detailed here, use the interactive dashboards. You can also explore the dashboards to uncover different insights and trends.

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This interactive presentation contains the latest gas production data through February this year from all 3,539 horizontal wells in Louisiana, that started production since 2007, with most of these wells (>90%) being located in the Haynesville basin. In several dashboards I’ve pre-selected only this basin.

As shown in the above graph, gas production rose by about 50% in 2017 to over 4.5 Bcf/d, as more wells were completed, their initial productivity was higher, and several older wells were again stimulated. Data for especially the last 3 months may be revised significantly.

Although still relatively small (< 1 Bcf/d), several operators have started to access the Cotton Valley formation in Lincoln parish in recent years, and production there has grown rapidly (you can find this area on the map in the “Where?” overview, just northeast of the Haynesville basin).

In the “Well quality” tab the changes in the production profiles over the past years are visible. As the bottom graph shows, a typical well that started in 2015 recovered 3.7 Bcf in the first 20 months on production, versus just over 5 Bcf for a well starting in 2016. Major factors behind these changes are longer laterals (up by over 10% over this period), and more proppants (higher by more than 50%!). The average completion in 2017 used 20 million pounds of proppants, double the amount that was used 2 years earlier.

The largest operator in this area is Chesapeake, with more than 1 Bcf/d of operated production capacity, as the last tab shows.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Return” overview shows the relationship between production rates, and cumulative recovery, over time. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started. For more recent and granular data you can set the ‘Show wells by’ selection to ‘quarter’ or ‘month of first flow’.

The graph makes clear that the drastic changes in well completion designs in the past few years had a strong effect. It is not uncommon now for a well to recover 5 Bcf before the first 1.5 years on production, while many older wells have not even reached that level yet.

In the ‘Productivity ranking’ overview, operators are ranked by the average performance of their wells, as measured by the amount of gas recovered in the first 2 years. BHP Billiton and Vine are some of the top performers, although this ranking changes slightly if you either change the measurement period, or only look at more recent wells (using the ‘Year of first flow’ selection).

I expect to have a new post on the Eagle Ford in the 2nd half of next week. I will delay my post on Pennsylvania to around the middle of June, when production data for Ohio is released as well.

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

• The Louisiana Department of Natural Resources
• FracFocus.org

Visit our blog to read the full post and use the interactive dashboards to gain more insight
https://shaleprofile.com/index.php/2018/05/22/haynesville-la-update-through-february-2018/

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Edited May 23, 2018 by shaleprofile