Visualizing US Oil & Gas Production (Through July September 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 oil & gas production data from 154,518 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through September. Ohio and West Virginia are included this time, as both recently reported Q3 production data.

Total production

US tight oil production rose to 7.5 million b/d in September (after upcoming revisions), 0.4 million b/d more than at the start of 2021. Tight gas production is already setting new heights each month (toggle product to ‘Gas’ to see this), and came in at 85 Bcf/d in September (also after upcoming revisions).

Supply Projection

Currently 525 rigs are drilling horizontal wells in the 13 US states that we cover (according to Baker Hughes), 213 more than a year earlier. With this strong increase in activity, our outlook has dramatically changed over the year:

US Hz. rig count (top) and tight oil outlook (bottom), by basin, based on the latest rig count (525) and rig/well performance

With more rigs returning to the fields in the coming months, we project that a new tight oil output record can be set in US shale in Q2/Q3, with most of the growth coming from the Permian Basin.

Well productivity

Well productivity has increased over the years in the major tight oil basins, as you can find in the following overview:

 

Well performance (average rate vs. cum.) in the 3 main tight oil basins. Hz. oil wells completed since 2009 only.

In the top chart you can see how normalized well productivity (average cumulative oil produced in the first 3 months, normalized for lateral length) has changed over time in each of these basins. It reveals that based on this metric productivity increased strongly through 2016, but has not changed by much since. In the Eagle Ford you can find a surprisingly strong increase in performance earlier this year, but the number of wells completed was also lower. The bottom 2 charts plot the average lateral length and proppant loading over time for each of these basins.

Top operators

In the final tab the output and location of the 12 largest US shale oil producers are displayed. EOG is in the lead with close to 600 thousand b/d of operated production capacity, followed by Pioneer Natural Resources and ConocoPhillips.

Finally

Our next post will be on North Dakota, which already released November production data for almost all wells (available in our subscription services), followed by posts on the Permian and the Eagle Ford.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For these presentations, we used data gathered from the sources listed below.

• FracFocus.org
• Arkansas Oil & Gas Commission
• Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Similar to Texas, lease/unit production is allocated over wells in order to estimate their individual production histories.
• Montana Board of Oil and Gas
• New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission
• North Dakota Department of Natural Resources
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources
• Oklahoma Corporation Commission – Oil & Gas Division
• Oklahoma Tax Commission
• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
• Texas Railroad Commission. Individual well production is estimated through the allocation of lease production data over the wells in a lease, and from pending lease production data.
• Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining
• Automated Geographic Reference Center of Utah.
• West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
• West Virginia Geological & Economic Survey
• Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission

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