Visualizing Pennsylvania Oil & Gas Production (Through July 2019)

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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.

This interactive presentation contains the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 9,087 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through July.

Gas production set a new record in July, at 18.5 Bcf/d. In the first 7 months of this year, 380 new wells came online, versus 417 in the same period last year. As is shown by the blue curves, total July production from wells that began production since last year was just below 50%. This is an (incomplete) indication that declines are lower than in the tight oil basins, where you often find a much higher percentage for this metric.

Like in many of the other basins, improvements in well productivity have also slowed down here since 2017 (see the “Well quality tab). New wells are on a path to recover more than 5 Bcf of natural gas by year 3.

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 particular year.

A straight line on this type of plot indicates that the production from the related wells is following a harmonic decline. If the more recent wells follow these trends, they may each recover well above 10 Bcf of gas, before having declined to a rate of 100 Mcf/d.

In the webinar last week (our first ever!), which was about terminal decline rates, we saw that the terminal decline rates in the Barnett and the Marcellus were the lowest among the major tight gas basins, at around 10-12% after 7 years on production. You can find a recording of this webinar here: ShaleProfile Webinar – Terminal Decline Rates

Over the weekend Texas published new production data, through July for most wells. Later this week I will have a post on the Permian based on this data, but it is also already available in our subscription services.

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

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection

FracFocus.org