US – update through December 2020

By: Enno Peters
Published: Apr 08, 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 138,207 horizontal wells in 12 US states, through December. West Virginia is excluded, as it has as of now not yet reported Q4 production data (which is scheduled for later this week).

Total production

US tight oil production fell below 7.0 million bo/d in December, the first time it did in the 2nd half of last year. Fewer than 7,500 horizontal wells were completed within these 12 states in 2020, significantly lower than the 13 thousand that came online in each of the previous two years. The y-o-y decline in output was therefore large in December, at around 1.5 million bo/d, which you’ll find in the graph above.

Supply Projection

Tight oil & gas production will however not fall much more, given current D&C levels. As our Supply Projection dashboard shows, current tight oil production can be roughly sustained with the latest horizontal rig count (389 according to Baker Hughes), while gas output could soon start rising again. With more rigs likely being added in the coming weeks & months, this outlook will further improve:

Well performance

Well productivity edged higher in the main tight oil basins, on average, which is visualized in the Well Quality tab. This does not consider that laterals got longer in 2020 (they did).

Top operators

The 12 largest tight oil operators are displayed in the final overview (“Top operators”). Pioneer Natural Resources may soon jump from the 4th place to the 2nd or 3rd place, after its acquisition of Double Eagle is closed. EOG is still well in the lead, with 600 thousand b/d of operated production.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on North Dakota, which has released February production data (already available in our services).

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.