Eagle Ford – Page 20 – Peak Oil Barrel

The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report, Is Productivity Really Improving?

04/14/201404/14/2014 Ron Patterson 122 Comments

The EIA just published their latest Drilling Productivity Report. They kept their very linear increase for all LTO plays except for the Bakken. Strangely they updated their Bakken data right up through January according to the data they apparently received from North Dakota.

The last data point is February for the North Dakota data and May for the DPR data.

But the EIA posted some strange Legacy Decline numbers for the Bakken;

Now this just doesn’t make any sense. The legacy decline is supposed to be the number of barrels per day all the wells in the combined declined. That number should increase, but gradually as new production comes on line. That is the more production the greater the decline. They have the decline rate at 60,553 bp/d in November, jumping to 123,248 in December, then falling back to 63,459 in January. That is impossible! The decline, in barrels per day, increases as production increases. But if production decreases then the number of barrels per day that declines must decrease, not increase.

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Bakken Update February Production Numbers

04/11/201404/14/2014 Ron Patterson 136 Comments

The latest Update on Bakken and North Dakota LTO production is out.
ND Monthly Bakken Oil Production Statistics (Bakken Only)
ND Monthly Oil Production Statistics (All North Dakota)

Bakken production in February was 888,398 barrels per day and all North Dakota February production was 951,350 barrels per day. Some revisions were made in the past production numbers. Only the last three months were significant however. Listed below are the actual production changes, per month, for the last three months:

Month Bakken North Dakota
Dec 13 -45,528 -40,284
Jan 14 6,542 -2,218
Feb 14 16,643 16,224

The Director’s Cut for this has not been published yet. I will update this post when it has been. There were 119 additional wells in the Bakken and 79 in all North Dakota. That means a lot of North Dakota Wells were shut down.

A Bismark engineering firm has calculated the probable Bakken Peak.
Competition from Texas, winter expected to limit ND oil production

MINOT, N.D. – North Dakota oil production, which is poised to break the 1 million barrels per day benchmark, will peak at 1.2 million to 1.5 million barrels per day over the next five years, limited by winter weather and competition from Texas, a Bismarck engineering firm said this week.

I have charted that prediction below. The figures are the average yearly production.

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Texas RRC Crude and Condensate Data, Is Eagle Ford Peaking?

03/21/201403/24/2014 Ron Patterson 113 Comments

This page Texas Oil and Gas Production was last updated on February 18. However the data on this page has been updated. And the January production has been updated also: Oil and Gas Production Data Query then check “Lease”, “Both”, Statewide and then punch in the appropriate dates. Then when the next page comes up click on “Monthly Totals”. This brings up the updated monthly totals for Crude, Casinghead Gas, Gas Well Gas and Condensate.

There were revisions going back to July 2010 but only 2013 had any major revisions though there were some 2012 revisions also as the chart below shows.

The earlier revisions were smaller and there were some of them that were negative. That is the figures were revised downward.

This chart compares Texas with North Dakota. This is all Texas not just Eagle Ford. The last data point for all is January 2014.

Though there is a lot of conventional production in Texas, the increase is nevertheless about all tight oil. And these two states produce perhaps 95% of all tight oil produced in the United States. And that is about 2 million barrels so far if the Texas RRC is close.

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The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report, Ghana and China

03/10/201403/10/2014 Ron Patterson 59 Comments

The EIA’s latest Drilling Productivity Report has been published. I found some strange things in the report. For the Bakken, their data does not jive with that posted by North Dakota. I have plotted the two together. The North Dakota includes all North Dakota but not the Montana part of the Bakken. The EIA data includes all the Bakken but not the non-Bakken part of North Dakota. Almost a wash but not quite. Montana produces slightly more than the non-Bakken part of North Dakota, but not very much. Anyway…

I thought for sure that the EIA would hear that Bakken Production was down about 50,000 barrels per day in December. But Nooooo… they have the Bakken up by over 20,000 barrels per day in December, a difference of 70,000 bp/d. But up until the last two or three months they follow the North Dakota data pretty close so we can hope they update their data in a few months.

However all LTO production was revised upward in this last report. The chart below is the barrels per day that all tight oil was revised upward.

Doesn’t the strange shape of that chart raise suspicions? December production was revised upward by 34,672 bp/d when it actually should have been revised downward by perhaps twice that amount. January production was revised upward by 35,243 barrels per day. I doubt very much that this was the actual case.

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EIA’s Petroleum Supply Monthly by State, Texas Reporting Problems

02/28/201402/28/2014 Ron Patterson 319 Comments

The EIA releases two monthly petroleum data sets for US oil production. The Monthly Energy Review which gives the US production and consumption of all forms of energy, oil, natural gas, coal and electricity. The other, the Petroleum Supply Monthly deals only with petroleum but gives every possible statistic, production, refining, export and import from every state and district.

Concerning total US crude oil production the two should agree but they don’t. From December 2011 back they have the exact same production numbers but the near months differ greatly. I have found that the latter, the Petroleum Supply Monthly is the most accurate. The Monthly Energy Review usually changes their numbers to match the Petroleum Supply Monthly but both revise their numbers as more accurate numbers come in. They both are published the last week of the month but the M.E.R is always a month ahead with their data.

Here are their the numbers in KB/d and the difference between the two.

Notice that the former had US production up by 333 kb/d in December while the latter had US production down by 77 kb/d in December. But both will be revised to match what each state or pad reports later on.

There is no uniform reporting strategy among different states. They all appear to do it differently and on a different time frame. For instance the PSM, which is the only one of the two that reports state by state production number, reports the exact same numbers for North Dakota that we get from North Dakota. But they get their Texas data from the Texas Rail Road Commission. And the Texas RRC is very delinquent with their reporting. They just report the numbers as they come in from the field and every month they change as more numbers come in, sometimes taking many months until all the numbers are in. So the EIA just guesses at Texas production numbers.

Texas and North Dakota daily C+C production in KB/D. The last data point is December 2013.

Notice the last nine months are extremely linear. In fact each month, April through December, Texas monthly crude production increased by exactly 50,000 barrels per day.
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