Pennsylvania – update through December 2020

By: Enno Peters
Published: Feb 23, 2021

These interactive presentations contain the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 9,981 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through December.

Total production

Pennsylvania has been setting natural gas output records every year for over a decade, and 2020 was no exception; a fresh record was recorded in December at 20.6 Bcf/d. This was done despite a decade-low in the number of well completions (561 in 2020, vs. 713 in 2019).

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the top 5 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania can be found. EQT is with 4 Bcf/d well in the lead, followed by Chesapeake with just over 3 Bcf/d of production capacity.

Productivity ranking

Which operators have the best performing wells? In our Productivity Ranking dashboard, you can easily rank operators (or other dimensions) based on a performance metric. For example, here you will find a ranking of all operators in this area based on the average volume of cumulative gas recovered in the first 6 months:

Ranking of operators in Pennsylvania based on average well performance.

In this example, I’ve only selected wells that began production from 2018. Based on this metric, Chesapeake was in the lead, with an average of just over 3 Bcf of natural gas in the first 6 months (129 wells), just above Cabot (2.86 Bcf of gas over 231 wells). You will find the location of all the included wells on the map, where they are colored by the same metric (red is better).

I found it interesting to see that well productivity is still on the rise in several key counties, as is visualized in this chart:

Well productivity over time for 6 selected counties in Pennsylvania

This chart shows how well productivity has changed in 6 important counties, based on the same performance metric. As you can see, in all except Greene County, well results set another high in 2020. However, as mentioned, the number of completions was also lower last year.

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Recovery” overview reveals the relationship between gas production rates and cumulative gas production, averaged for all horizontal wells that began production in a particular year.

Finally

Early next week we will have a post on all covered states in the US.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

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

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
FracFocus.org

Brief manual

The above presentations have many interactive features:

You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.
Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items.
You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.
Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.
You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.
By clicking on the legend you can highlight selected items.
Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.
The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.
If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.