Visualizing Marcellus (PA) oil & gas production (through February 2019)

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Marcellus (PA) – update through February 2019

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 8,788 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing since 2010, through February 2019.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

Gas production in Pennsylvania fell by 1% m-o-m to 18.1 Bcf/d, after setting a new record in January. Compared with a year earlier, this was just over 2 Bcf/d higher.

An important reason behind the recent highs is that well productivity has continued to improve, as you’ll find in the ‘Well quality’ tab. The 748 wells that started in 2017 are on a path to recover more than 4 Bcf in the first 2 years on production, on average, more than double the amount that was recovered by wells that started 5 years earlier.

As in many basins, proppant loadings have increased significantly in the past few years. In 2012 wells were completed with about 4.3 million pounds of proppants, on average. By the end of last year, this number was close to 18 million pounds.

Almost all leading operators started the year with record production (“Top operators”). EQT, which bought Rice Energy, is the largest producer with 3.5 Bcf/d of production in February. However, as both entities are still reported separately, it now comes 4th in the ranking.

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 began production in a certain year.

If you extrapolate these curves, you’ll find that newer wells are on a trajectory to recover more than 10 Bcf on average, before they have declined to a level of 100 Mcf/d.

If you group the wells by quarter (using the “Show wells by” selection), the wells are sorted and averaged by quarter instead, which allows you to see more granularity and recent data. It also reveals that the 195 wells that started in Pennsylvania in the 4th quarter last year had a remarkably good start, recovering 1 Bcf on average in the first 3 months on production.

We were happy to see that Trent Jacobs, from the JPT, wrote an excellent article about the other major shale gas basin, the Haynesville, last week, and that he used our analytics service for that: New Operators, Well Designs Drive Record Gas Production in Haynesville.

Later this week we will have a post on the Eagle Ford, followed by updates on the Permian and the Haynesville Basin next week.

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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