Permian Basin Update, February 24, 2022

Much of the information for this post comes from data at shaleprofile , and assessments by the USGS. In addition a paper published in Jan 2022 by Wardana Saputra et al was an excellent resource.

The basic method used in the is analysis is covered in an earlier post, essentially the convolution of average well profiles with the monthly completion rate over time is used to model future output. I focus on the period starting in Jan 2010 and consider only horizontal tight oil wells in the analysis. Future well profiles are estimated and several future scenarios for completion rate are used, clearly the future is unknown so future completion rates and estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) for wells completed in the future can only be guessed at.

In order to make such a guess I start with the USGS assessments for the Permian basin where the mean estimate for prospective net acres as of mid 2017 was about 50 million acres. I use an estimate for average acres per well of 300 acres (about 9500 feet lateral length with spacing of 1320 feet between laterals) which gives an estimate of about 167 thousand wells. There were about 14 thousand wells already completed in the Permian basin by June 2017 so total completions would be about 181 thousand wells, if oil prices were high enough to make every potential well location profitable. Using the mean UTRR estimate (70 Gb) and number of potential drilling locations (about 160 thousand as of Dec 21, 2021 based on the data at shale profile where about 21 thousand wells were completed from July 2017 to Dec 2021), I find and estimate for the future decrease in EUR per well that will result in a UTRR of 70 Gb if all potential wells were completed.

After that step a discounted cash flow analysis using guesses of future costs and prices is used to determine whether a well will be profitable to complete to arrive at an ERR for a given scenario, typically ERR is less than TRR, but in rare high oil price scenarios they could be nearly equal.

Average well profiles have been developed by fitting an Arps hyperbolic function to the data from shaleprofile.com for the average 2010 to 2012 well and then for each individual year from 2013 to 2020. In my scenarios I assume EUR starts to decrease after Dec 2020 and assume no further increase in lateral length or change in average well spacing.

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Bakken Summary

A guest post by George Kaplan

The North Dakota area of the Bakken LTO basin has accessible data from the ND Department of Natural Resources, Oil and Gas Division. Production here seems to be past peak and in general decline. The data presented here is therefore more a historical perspective than of much interest in predicting issues that may have significant impact for the future. However it may give some indication on what to expect in the Permian basins, the only ones left in the US that may have capacity to increase production. The Texas RRC does also produce good data but a global data dump produces files that are too big for my computer to handle and splitting into smaller subsets is too man-hour intensive for me to pursue.

Production Across the Area

These charts show how the oil production has changed every three years by range (almost equivalent to lines of longitudes) and township lines (latitudes). These lines run every six miles and the area they contain is called a township, consisting of 36 square mile sections (that’s the simplified explanation, earth’s curvature and irregular land features make things a bit more complicated). 

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US October Oil Production Declines

A post by Ovi at peakoilbarrel

To all of our participants, I wish you a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year.

All of the oil (C + C) production data for the US state charts comes from the EIAʼs Petroleum Supply monthly PSM. After the production charts, an analysis of three EIA monthly reports that project future US production is provided. The charts below are updated to October 2020 for the 10 largest US oil producing states.

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U.S. Oil Production Is Competing Against Decline

A Post by Ovi at peakoilbarrel . com

All of the oil production data for the US states comes from the EIAʼs Petroleum Supply Monthly. In addition, information from other EIA offices is provided to project future US output. At the end, an estimate is made for the decline rate in the L48 conventional oil fields and an analysis of a few different EIA reports is undertaken.

The charts below are updated to October 2019 for the 10 largest US oil producing states (>100 kb/d).

U.S. oil output continued to increase in October 2019. Production reached a new high of 12,655 kb/d, an increase 171 kb/d over September and 55 kb/d higher than estimated by the December Monthly Energy Review (MER). However it is 93 kb/d lower than the 12,748 kb/d estimated in the December STEO report. This could be an indication that the January STEO report will again lower US production estimates for 2020.

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