Visualizing Haynesville Oil & Gas Production (Through December 2020)

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This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

This interactive presentation contains the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 5,880 horizontal wells in the Haynesville that started producing from 2007, through December 2020.

Total production

Natural gas production came in close to 11 Bcf/d in December (after upcoming revisions), approaching the peak of May 2020, even though fewer wells were completed in 2020 compared with the 2 years before (~350 vs. 421 & 432 in 2019/2018).

Supply Projection dashboard

Interest in the basin has really picked up  in the last 10 months, with 50% more rigs drilling horizontal wells than in May 2020 (47 according to the Baker Hughes rig count). We estimate that the Haynesville is already setting new production records at the moment, which is also visible in our Supply Projection dashboard, after selecting this basin:

Natural gas outlook for the Haynesville, based on current rig count & productivity.

As is visualized here in the bottom chart, the current rig count could sustain a production level of close to 18 Bcf/d by the end of the decade, if nothing else changes (which of course it will).

Well productivity

Initial production rates in the Haynesville are very high, compared with for example the Marcellus. But the declines are also steeper, so we expect that after about 20 years on production, the differences in EUR are actually quite small. This is visible in the following chart from a dashboard in our service in which we are displaying the 20-year production forecasts that we create for all wells in our database with a sufficient production history:

Actual and forecasted average cumulative gas production in the Haynesville and the Marcellus. Horizontal gas wells from 2017-2019 only.

The dotted part of these curves reflect our production forecasts. You can see that for the selected wells, the average gas EUR after 20 years in both basins is close to 12 Bcf of natural gas.

In the “Well quality” tab in the interactive presentation at the top of this page, you can also see the strong increase in performance compared with wells that began producing before 2016. An important reason behind this improvement is that proppant loadings have more than tripled in the past 5 years, with proppant intensity now averaging around 4,000 pounds of proppants per lateral foot.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the leading 10 natural gas producers in this basin are displayed. Comstock is well in the lead, with an operated output of 1.8 Bcf/d. Aethon Energy just took over the 2nd spot from Indigo.

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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

Also here the improvements in well productivity can be nicely seen. If you group the wells by quarter, you will see that the 79 wells that started producing in Q3 2020 had the best start ever.

Finally

Early next week we will have a post on the Permian again.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• The Louisiana Department of Natural Resources
• Texas RRC. Production data is provided on lease level. Individual well production data is estimated from a range of data sources, including regular well tests, and pending lease reports.
• FracFocus.org

Visit our blog to read the full post and use the interactive dashboards to gain more insight: http://bit.ly/3rENLui

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