US – update through September 2020

By: Enno Peters
Published: Jan 06, 2021

Icon This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 123,933 horizontal wells in 11 US states, through September. Oklahoma & West Virginia are excluded as these states did not yet publish complete production data for Q3.

Total production

US tight oil production was flat m-o-m in September at 7.0 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions, including estimates for Oklahoma). Again some 1,500 horizontal wells that were temporarily shut-in came back online, which helped stem the underlying decline.

Supply Projection

Our outlook for tight oil & gas production has improved, as 30 rigs were added in each of the last 2 months (to 312 as of last week, according to the Baker Hughes rig count). But this level is still not enough to maintain current production:

Tight oil outlook at current drilling activity and well/rig productivity

The screenshot above was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard, which is also available in the Ultimate version of ShaleProfile Analytics. It shows that since November 2019 about 2 million b/d of output has been lost, and that more than another 1 million b/d will not be replaced if drilling activity does not pick up further.

Tight gas output is also expected to fall at current activity levels, but somewhat less so (switch “Product” to gas to see that).

Top operators

The 10 largest operators are visualized in the last overview (“Top operators”). Of these, only Exxon Mobil set a new output record in September.

Advanced Insights

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.

You can see how average well productivity has improved in the last 10 years, but also that the rate of improvements has slowed down since 2017. The impact of the recent shut-ins also starts to become visible now in the older vintages. I do expect that in the coming months we’ll see a partial rebound in the production profiles for these wells (which already is clear if you group the wells by quarter or month of first production).

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which already has released November production data (available in our subscription services). It reported a m-o-m decline of below 1%.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For these presentations, we 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
Oklahoma Corporation Commission – Oil & Gas Division
Oklahoma Tax Commission
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

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.