Visualizing Pennsylvania Oil & Gas Production (Through May 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 10,163 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through May.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania was flat month over month in May, at 20.2 Bcf/d (hz. wells only). Year over year growth was 1.4 Bcf/d, despite that last year only 560 wells were completed, the lowest in over a decade. How was that possible?

Well productivity

In the ‘Well quality’ tab, you will find the production profiles of all these wells, and you can clearly see that well productivity improved again significantly in 2020.

This can also be nicely viewed in the following chart from our Production Profiles dashboard:

Average horizontal well performance in Pennsylvania. Average natural gas production rate vs. cum. production, by vintage.

The 561 horizontal wells completed in 2020 recovered 2.3 Bcf of natural gas in the first 6 months on production,  and were still flowing at over 10 thousand Mcf/d at that point, on average.

Terminal decline rates

What kind of decline rates are we observing for older wells with about 10 years of production behind them?

To answer that question, we developed the Terminal decline rates dashboard:

Natural gas production rates and annual decline rates in Pennsylvania by vintage. Older horizontal wells only.

The top chart displays the average production rate of horizontal wells in Pennsylvania, by vintage and number of years since production start.  The bottom chart displays the effective annual decline rates for the same wells. You can now easily observe that the horizontal wells that were completed in 2010/11 are now, after 10 years, doing on average 500 Mcf/d (top chart) and that their effective annual decline rate has fallen to about 7-8% a year.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 10 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed, with EQT and Chesapeake in the lead. Most of these operators were at or near their historical output record in May.

Finally

Unfortunately we couldn’t make it to the URTeC this week, due to the travel restrictions still in place. We hope all participants have a great event nonetheless!

Later this week we will have a new post on 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/3x7A1Kq

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