Visualizing Marcellus (PA) oil & gas production (through December)

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Marcellus (PA) – update through December 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 gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 8,706 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing since 2010, through December.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

Gas production in Pennsylvania ended last year at over 18 Bcf/d, with a y-o-y growth rate of 2 Bcf/d. This was the result of the addition of 6.8 Bcf/d from the just over 800 horizontal wells that started production in 2018, minus the 4.8 Bcf/d decline from legacy wells. Such a large contribution from new wells (6.8 Bcf/d in a year) has not been seen before in Pennsylvania.

A major factor behind this result is the increase in well stimulation. Newer wells are completed with over 18 million pounds of proppant on average per well, versus less than 14 million pounds per well in 2017. In our ShaleProfile Analytics service , you can analyze this by operator, or even by well.

 

Initial well productivity improved again in 2018, as you’ll find in the top chart in the ‘Well quality’ tab. The bottom chart shows that wells that started production in 2017 are on a path to recover 4 Bcf of natural gas in the first 2 years on production. The 2018 vintage has even a slightly better start.

 

The 5 largest natural gas producers in Pennsylvania produced each more than 1.5 Bcf/d at the end of 2018. Cabot is in the lead, with 2.7 Bcf/d of operated output.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Return” overview shows the relationship between gas production rates and cumulative gas production, averaged for all horizontal wells that came online in a certain year.

The 1,188 horizontal wells that started production in 2014 have on average recovered most natural gas, at just over 4 Bcf. They also appear to be on a path to recover more than the wells from the following 2 years. But the wells that have started production since 2017 clearly have a better start, peaking at over 10,000 Mcf/d on average.

 

In the 5th tab (‘Productivity over time’), you’ll find in more detail how well performance has changed over time. If you change the metric to measure the cumulative gas production in the first 3 months (instead of 24 months), you’ll note that, according to this metric, well productivity has more than tripled in the past 8 years. Newer wells recover on average 0.9 Bcf in the first 3 (calendar) months on production. For wells in Susquehanna County, this is even above 1.5 Bcf (use the ‘County’ selection to filter on this county).

 

By the middle of next week, we will have a new post on the Permian.

Production data is subject to revisions. For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
• FracFocus.org

 

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