Visualizing Permian Oil & Gas Production (Through February 2021)

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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.

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This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 30,341 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through February.

Total Production

Tight oil production in the Permian fell by over 600 thousand bo/d in February, the largest single-month decline in its history. Operations were severely impacted by the coldest weather in 30 years. Production plunged to just above 3 million bo/d (hz. wells only), the lowest volume in 2.5 years. Based on preliminary production data, we expect that March output was back to the January level.

Supply Projection

Since the bottom in August, 100 horizontal drilling rigs have been added to this play (222 vs 122), according to Baker Hughes. Based on this level of activity & current well productivity, output could soon start to rise again (if it hasn’t already):

Tight oil outlook in the Permian, based on current drilling activity & well productivity

 

This screenshot was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard.

Well productivity

As you can find in the 3rd tab, average well productivity has steadily increased over the years, especially in the 2013-2016 time frame when proppant loadings more than doubled.

However, after normalizing for the increase in lateral length, we find that results appear to have peaked so far in 2016:

Well productivity in the Permian basin; Average cumulative oil per 1,000 ft of lateral length vs. months on production, by vintage.

Our lateral length calculations are now highly accurate, as for almost all wells we know the length of the frac’ed part of the lateral, as well as detailed directional survey data. This data is now also available in our real-time data subscription.

 

If we take a closer look at how well results have changed within this basin, we also find that growth, on a normalized basis, has stalled:

Well productivity in the 6 top-producing counties in the Permian, from our Productivity over Time dashboard

The top-right chart shows how well performance has changed in these 6 counties, as measured by the average cumulative oil recovered per lateral foot in the first 18 months, by year of production start. Only well results in Eddy were at a new high in 2019. The charts below show the changes in key completion parameters (lateral length & proppant loading).

However, it should be noted that these results are impacted somewhat by the dips in May 2020 and February this year, when a large number of wells were temporarily shut-in. Also, this does not mean that technology improvements are no longer visible; just that the impact of worsening geology and downspacing might have become larger.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”) the production and well positions are displayed for the 10 largest producers in the Permian. The landscape has changed radically after recent M&A activity; in the space of just one year, Occidental dropped from 1st position to the number 4

Finally

We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford later this week.

Production and completion data are subject to revisions.

Note that a significant portion of production in the Permian comes from vertical wells and/or wells that started production before 2008, which are excluded from these presentations.

 

Sources

For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Texas RRC. Oil production is estimated for individual wells, based on a number of sources, such as lease & pending production data, well completion & inactivity reports, regular well tests, and oil production data.
• OCD in New Mexico. Individual well production data is provided.
• FracFocus.org

 

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