Visualizing Colorado & Wyoming Oil & Gas Production (Through April 2019)

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Colorado & Wyoming – update through April 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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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 10,717 horizontal wells that started production in Colorado and Wyoming from 2009/2010 onward, through April 2019.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

Oil production in these 2 states almost doubled from early 2017 until the end of last year to 640 thousand bo/d. Despite a jump in production, April came in slightly below the December peak.

The underlying declines are high as you can see by following the top of the colored areas. For example, the total oil production from the 8,561 horizontal wells that began production before 2018 declined from 513 thousand bo/d in Dec 2017 to 205 thousand bo/d in April this year (60% in 16 months).

The natural gas production profile looks rather different (switch “Product” to gas); it is setting new records on almost a monthly basis, and it is currently at over 3.6 Bcf/d.

In the “Well quality” tab you will find the production profiles for all these wells, with the main oil basins pre-selected (the DJ and the Powder River Basin). Surprisingly, well productivity has slightly declined since 2017, the year in which a major boost in productivity can be seen. By extrapolating these production profiles, you can find that after about 7-10 years on production, most wells are falling below a rate of 10 bo/d.

Anadarko, still the leading operator, is almost on the same output level as 4 years ago. The other operators in the top-5 (Noble Energy, Extraction, EOG & PDC) all set new production records in recent months.

The “Advanced Insights” presentation is displayed below:

In this “Ultimate Recovery” graph, the average cumulative production is plotted against the production rate. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

This chart reveals that the wells that began production before 2017 are on a path to recover 70-140 thousand barrels of oil before they have declined to 10 bo/d. The wells that came online in the past 2 years may recover 160 to 200 thousand barrels of oil, before hitting this level. These are all averages; if you only select the Powder River Basin (using the “Basin” filter), you will find that EURs are higher there.

Early next week we will have a post on all the 12 US states that we publicly cover (Oklahoma is available in our subscription services).

Production data is subject to revisions.

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission
• FracFocus.org

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