US – update through May 2021

By: Enno Peters
Published: Sep 08, 2021

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 145,364 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through May. Ohio & West Virginia are deselected in most dashboards, as they haven’t reported any Q2 production data yet.

Total production

US tight oil production rose by 100 thousand b/d in May, to 7.2 million b/d (after upcoming revisions). This was almost a million b/d higher than a year earlier, when extremely low prices caused a significant part of production to be curtailed. But compared with the peak in November 2019, output fell by almost 1.5 million b/d. Natural gas production (excl. Ohio & West Virginia) grew slightly as well, to a fresh record at just above 70 Bcf/d (toggle product to ‘gas’).

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count in the Lower 48 states has climbed to 462 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes). At this level, and assuming no changes in drilling or well productivity, we expect output growth to resume, albeit at a far lower pace than before the pandemic, as is visualized in our Supply Projection dashboard:

US tight oil outlook, by basin, based on current drilling activity & well performance

Note that the Permian basin, where more than 50% of these rigs are drilling, is responsible for all this growth (you can select solely this basin in the Basin selection on the left side in the interactive version).

Natural gas production is also projected to grow at current conditions, and could reach 100 Bcf/d by the end of the decade (making the unrealistic assumption that all else will stay equal):

Natural gas output would grow in this scenario by about 50% in both the Haynesville and the Permian Basin from today’s level.

Horizontal oil well productivity

Although well productivity on average is still inching higher (see the Well quality tab), we find that in the major oil basis, after normalizing for lateral length, well results were unchanged in the last 5 years:

Normalized well performance in the major oil basins (rate vs cumulative production, per thousand feet). Horizontal oil wells completed since 2010 only.

Top operators

In the final tab the output and location of the 15 largest US shale producers are displayed. The top 3, including EOG, ConocoPhillips and Pioneer Natural Resources, produce now 0.5 million b/d or more from horizontal tight oil wells.

Finally

Our next post will be on North Dakota, which already released July production data (available in our subscription 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.