Permian oil production recovered for the 2nd month in July to 3.8 million b/d (hz wells), ~10% lower than in March

But the 128 horizontal rigs currently running in the basin can only sustain an output below 3 million b/d, assuming no changes in productivity.

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 28,071 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through July.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

Total Production

Oil production in the Permian recovered further in July, to around 3.8 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). Natural gas production was at over 14 Bcf/d close to the March high (toggle Product to gas to see this).

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count has slowly grown in this basin over the past 3 months, to 128 as of last week (source Baker Hughes). This was however still more than 2/3rds below the count in mid-March. The current level should be able to sustain just below 3 million b/d, as you can find in our Supply projection dashboard by selecting this basin:

Tight oil outlook in the Permian, by county, based on current drilling activity & productivity

We therefore expect that after July the decline has set in again.

Well Performance

In the “Well quality” tab, the production profiles for all these wells are visualized. Well results greatly improved until about 2016, after which the rate of improvements slowed down significantly. In the past 2 years, average well productivity has almost not changed (unnormalized; thus not taking into account changes in well design).

The following chart reveals how performance has changed in each of the top-8 producing counties in the Permian, based on the average cumulative oil production in the first 2 years (source: ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional):

Well productivity in the top-8 Permian counties, by production start date. Oil wells since 2013 only.

Loving County was in the lead in 2018, as the oil wells here recovered almost 250 thousand barrels of oil in the first 2 years. Reeves County is the only one on the list that saw some deterioration in 2018 compared with the year before.

Top Operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”) the production and positions are displayed for the 10 largest producers in the Permian. The top 3 (Occidental, Concho and Pioneer) produced almost equal volumes in July (~280 thousand b/d). EOG, Exxon Mobil and Chevron increased output the most in the same month.

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview displays the average production rate for these wells, plotted against their cumulative recovery. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

Finally

We will have a new post on the Eagle Ford later this week.

ShaleProfile has started to expand coverage now to outside US shale; in our analytics portal you will also find highly up-to-date production data from wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

Production and completion data are subject to revisions.

Note that a significant portion of production in the Permian comes from vertical wells and/or wells that started production before 2008, which are excluded from these presentations.

Sources

For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Texas RRC. Oil production is estimated for individual wells, based on a number of sources, such as lease & pending production data, well completion & inactivity reports, regular well tests, and oil production data.
• OCD in New Mexico. Individual well production data is provided.
• FracFocus.org

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