Visualizing Permian oil & gas production (through September)

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Permian – update through September 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 17,997 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing since 2008/2009, through September.

Visit ShaleProfile blog  to explore the full interactive dashboards

Last week I planned a post on the Permian, but noticed that September data for New Mexico was still quite incomplete (100 kbo/d, or ~20% of production has not yet been reported). Unfortunately, it still is, but I did not want to delay this update any further.

The graph above shows clearly the astonishing rise in oil production in the Permian in the past 2 years, as oil production from horizontal wells more than doubled to over 2.8 million bo/d in September (which will be visible after upcoming revisions). More than 1.5 million bo/d in September came from ~3,200 horizontal wells that started in 2018.

In New Mexico a single operator seems to be responsible for most of the missing production in September: EOG, which is also the largest producer in this state. After you exclude EOG from the graph (using the ‘Operator’ selection), you will see that the apparent drop in September has almost disappeared.

 

In the ‘Well quality’ tab you’ll find the production profiles for all these wells. By default they are grouped and averaged by the year in which they started production. With this setting, you’ll find in the bottom plot that well productivity improved significantly in the past 5 years. Wells that started in 2013 recovered 77 thousand barrels of oil in the first 2 years, on average, while this more than doubled to 183 thousand barrels of oil for wells that started 3 years later.

Since 2016 the pace of improvements appears to have slowed down, as you’ll see by following the 2017/2018 curves.

 

The final tab shows the performance of the leading operators. You’ll see the effects of the acquisition of RSP Permian by Concho, and the missing production for EOG in New Mexico in September.

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 year in which production started. This kind of plot doesn’t assume any kind of decline behavior, but a harmonic decline (b factor of 1), will show up as a straight line with the given settings.

The 2,215 horizontal wells that started in 2016 (light brown curve) are on track to recover each around 200 thousand barrels of oil, once they have declined to an average production rate of 100 bo/d. Newer wells appear to be on track to do slightly better than that.

 

Tomorrow we will have a new show at enelyst (live chat combined with images), where we will take a closer look at the latest Permian data. The show will be available here in the enelyst ShaleProfile Briefings channel. If you are not an enelyst member yet, you can sign up for free at enelyst.com.

Early next week we will have a post 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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