Visualizing US Oil & Gas Production (Through May 2019)

[shaleprofile + 243]

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.

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 113,568 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through May 2019. Cumulative oil and gas production from these wells reached 11.5 billion bbl and 131.7 Tcf of natural gas. West Virginia is deselected in most dashboards, as it has a greater reporting lag. Oklahoma is for now only available in our subscription services.

Oil production from horizontal wells in these states grew to close to 7 million bo/d in May (after upcoming revisions). As is visible in the graph above, the growth rate has significantly fallen since the end of last year.

The same is the case for natural gas production. If you toggle the “Product” selection to “Gas”, you’ll notice that production has hovered just below 63 Bcf/d since the start of the year in the selected states.

In the “Well quality” tab, the production profiles of all the horizontal wells in the major tight oil basins are selected. Well productivity (not normalized for the increases in lateral length or proppants) has still improved in the past 2 years, but by a far smaller amount than in the 10 previous years.

Based on preliminary data, at least EOG and Marathon set new production records in May (see “Top operators”). If you click on these operators in the legend, the map will show you exactly where they have produced their oil.

 

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows the relationship between production rates and cumulative production over time. The oil basins are preselected and the wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

The 11,304 horizontal wells with first production in 2014 have recovered on average 150 thousand barrels of oil after 4.5 years on production. They are now at an average rate of 32 bo/d. The wells that began 3 years later have recovered the same amount, but they are still flowing at a rate of 100 bo/d higher, on average.

Next week Thursday (September 19th) we will host our first webinar (30 mins). Based on popular request, the topic will be terminal decline rates in the major tight oil & gas basins. You can register, and already ask your questions about this topic here: ShaleProfile webinar registration page.

Early next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which will release July production data in the coming days.

Production data is subject to revisions. For these presentations, I used data gathered from the sources listed below.

FracFocus.org

Arkansas Oil & Gas Commission

Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission

Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Similar to Texas, lease/unit production is allocated over wells in order to estimate their individual production histories.

Montana Board of Oil and Gas

New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission

North Dakota Department of Natural Resources

Ohio Department of Natural Resources

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection

Texas Railroad Commission. Individual well production is estimated through the allocation of lease production data over the wells in a lease, and from pending lease production data.

Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining

Automated Geographic Reference Center of Utah.

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection

West Virginia Geological & Economic Survey

Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission

Edited September 11, 2019 by shaleprofile

[DanilKa + 443]

thanks for your public  service, Enno!

Staggering and ever-increasing decline as we stack up ~50% annual declines...

Have you looked at the "cubes"? Did they live up to the expectations to reduce parent-child interactions and improve recovery? thanks!

[shaleprofile + 243]

Thanks Daniel!

We've not looked at it in-depth, but the WSJ did. Here an article where they used our analytics platform to learn about the performance of Encana's cube in Midland County (behind paywall): https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-fracking-experiment-fails-to-pump-as-predicted-11562232601

This one wasn't so successful..

[James Regan + 1,776]

16 hours ago, shaleprofile said:

The 11,304 horizontal wells with first production in 2014 have recovered on average 150 thousand barrels of oil after 4.5 years on production

Shaleprofile can you explain the wording "average" are you referring to each well, ie the 11,304 wells averaged 150K Bbls over 4.5 years producing 33,333Bbl/year = 91.32Bbls/day?

[DanilKa + 443]

37 minutes ago, James Regan said:

Shaleprofile can you explain the wording "average" are you referring to each well, ie the 11,304 wells averaged 150K Bbls over 4.5 years producing 33,333Bbl/year = 91.32Bbls/day?

2014 wells peaked at ~400 bopd and dropped to ~30 bopd.

(IMO average numbers are as useful as an average temperature of patients in a hospital)

@shaleprofile Enno, why do we see more 2014 wells - 15,454? Does it mean 4,100 wells didn't make it to the date of the report?

[shaleprofile + 243]

James,

Indeed, on average each well produced 150 thousand barrels over these 4.5 years. Their average production rate was therefore indeed 91 bbl/d.

[shaleprofile + 243]

Daniel,

The difference is in the "Basin" selection. In the first overview (Total production), all basins, except WV, are selected.

In the 2nd overview (Ultimate recovery profiles), only the major tight oil basins are selected, as I wanted to highlight how well productivity within those basins has changed.

You can change these defaults with the "Basin" selection available below each chart. For example, if you want to see how well productivity has developed in the gas basins.

[DanilKa + 443]

Thanks, Enno @shaleprofile! 

Have you seen this piece on terminal decline? 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nature-character-widespread-oil-production-shortfalls-scott-lapierre

[shaleprofile + 243]

Daniel,

Yes, I saw it. In the upcoming blog posts I will also go into a bit more detail on GORs.