Visualizing Permian oil & gas production (through July)

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Permian – update through July 2018

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 17,140 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing since 2008/2009, through July.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

Output has continued to rise fast in the first half year, adding over 400 thousand barrels of oil per day from horizontal wells. The apparent drop in July is as usual due to incomplete data. As the graph above shows, more than 75% of oil production in July came from the ~5.7 thousand wells that started since the beginning of 2017.

Natural gas production from these wells is also trending higher, and has now passed 8 Bcf/d.

 

The “Cumulative production profiles” plot in the ‘Well quality’ tab reveals the steadily increasing well performance in the past couple of years. Since 2016 this performance has increased just slightly. The average well that started in 2016 recovered ~200 thousand barrels of oil in the first 2.5 years (30 months) on production.

 

This area counts many operators; the top 3 operators, Pioneer Natural Resources, EOG & Concho Resources, produce together just 23% of total production.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

 

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows the average production rate for these wells, plotted against their cumulative recovery. Wells are grouped by the quarter in which production started.

Over the past 5 years, laterals have increased by almost 50%, while proppant loadings more than tripled. This has greatly affected well productivity, as you can see by the ever higher recovery trajectories. But based on preliminary data, it appears that the proppant per lateral foot ratio has slightly fallen in Q2 this year, as lateral lengths increased faster than proppant usage. You can analyze this in more detail in our ShaleProfile Analytics service.

Recent wells are on average on track to recover just over 300 thousand barrels of oil, before their rate has dropped to 20 bo/d (which for most operators is probably still profitable).

 

Early next week I will have a post on the Eagle Ford, followed by one on all 10 covered states in the US.

Production data is 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.

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 proration data.
• OCD in New Mexico. Individual well production data is provided.
• FracFocus.org

 

 

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