Visualizing US Oil & Gas Production (Through December 2021)

This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from 157,040 horizontal wells in 13 US states, through November. West Virginia is excluded, as it hasn’t reported Q4 production data yet.

Total production

US tight oil production was up by about 1% in December, at 7.7 million b/d (after upcoming revisions), the highest level in over 1.5 years, and just 0.7 million b/d below the peak in 2019. Tight gas output set a fresh record in December, at over 80 Bcf/d (excluding West Virginia and after upcoming revisions).

Supply Projection

Currently 607 rigs are drilling horizontal wells in the 13 US states that we cover (according to Baker Hughes). What that means for future supply is visible in this overview from our Supply Projection dashboard:

US Hz. rig count (top) and tight oil projection (bottom), by basin, based on the latest rig count (607) and rig/well performance

As you can find in the bottom chart, with the current level of drilling (607 horizontal rigs in the 13 states we track), a new all-time high can be expected near the end of this year (if not sooner), with 5 million b/d coming from the Permian.

Well productivity

The following chart reveals how well productivity has changed in the 4 major tight oil basins over the last decade:

Average well productivity (average cum. oil in the first 6 months), by basin.

Well productivity, as measured by the average cumulative oil recovered in the first 6 months, has continued to increase in the Permian basin, despite the rise in completion activity. A horizontal well completed in the Permian last year recovered on average almost 120 thousand barrels of oil during the first 6 months. Note the surprising increase in well results in the Eagle Ford, after several years of stagnation. These results are not normalized for the increase in lateral lengths.

Top operators

In the final tab the output and location of the 15 largest US shale oil producers are displayed. The 2 shale oil operators with the fastest growth in the 2nd half of last year were Continental Resources and Endeavor Energy.

Finally

Our next post will be on North Dakota, which already released February 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

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