Visualizing Pennsylvania Oil & Gas Production (Through March 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.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

 

These interactive presentations contain the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 10,061 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through March.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania was flat in March at 20.6 Bcf/d (hz. wells only, after revisions). Year over year growth was just over 1 Bcf/d. With only 126 new horizontal wells completed through March, completion activity is at a decade low.

Well productivity

Well productivity has improved to an amazing extent from 10 years ago; the 1,004 horizontal wells that came online in 2021 are on track to recover about 4 Bcf of natural gas in their first 10 years on production (see “Well quality”), on average. The 561 horizontal wells that began production last year will likely recover this same amount in just a single year, on average.

Important factors behind this are longer laterals and larger proppant loadings:

Completion design in Pennsylvania over time (hz. wells since 2013). Source: Lateral lengths & Proppants Dashboard

In this chart you can see how these key completion parameters have changed in Pennsylvania, since 2013. It reveals that lateral lengths in Pennsylvania more than doubled since 2013, to over 10 thousand feet by the middle of last year, and that proppant loadings more than quadrupled.

EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the state, increased its average proppant loading even to 25 million pounds per completion in recent quarters:

EQT’s completion design in Pennsylvania since 2013.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 10 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed. Chesapeake, at over 3 Bcf/d of capacity now, appears to be closing the gap with EQT.

It’s well results improved strongly in 2020, as is visible in this screenshot from our Production Profiles dashboard:

Chesapeake’s well results in Pennsylvania since 2012.

The 70 wells that it brought online last year are on track to recover about 7 Bcf of natural gas in the first year, on average, well outperforming its competitors.

Finally

Later this week or early next week, we will have a new post covering the Haynesville.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

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

• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
• FracFocus.org

 

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

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