Permian – Page 10 – Peak Oil Barrel

EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report

07/14/201407/14/2014 Ron Patterson 63 Comments

Note: Just as I was finishing this post North Dakota published their production numbers for May 2014. North Dakota production was up over 36,000 barrels per day on 227 new well completions according to The Director’s Cut. I will have a post on all that tomorrow.

The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report has just came out. Below are a few charts gleaned from that report. The World’s seven largest publicly owned oil companies have peaked. Their combined production has declined 12.4% since 2009.

The Drilling Productivity Report shows, or tries to show, the true decline rate of shale oil and gas. I usually only track the oil however.

In January the EIA estimated that Bakken production from new wells would equal 88 kb/d. They estimated that the declines of all older wells would equal 63 kb/d leaving net production at 25 kb/d.

In August they estimate that Bakken production from new wells will equal 90 kb/d or 2 kb/d above January new well production. They estimate that the decline from older wells will equal 73 kb/d, an increase of 10 kb/d from January, leaving a net increase in production of 17 kb/d.

Eagle Ford fared a bit different. In January they thought new well production would increase by 120 kb/d while older wells would decline by 91 kb/d leaving net production 29 kb/d. In August they expect production from new wells will equal 140 kb/d, a whopping 20 kb/d over January numbers. However decline from older wells will have increased to 115 kb/d, 24 kb/d more than it was in January, leaving net production up 25 kb/d. So in spite of the 20 kb/d increase over January new well production, net production will still be 2 kb/d lower than January.
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The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report and Other News

06/09/201406/09/2014 Ron Patterson 141 Comments

The EIA just released its latest Drilling Productivity Report which is a report on all major shale plays in the U.S. All the data below, unless otherwise noted, is in barrels per day.

The EIA includes the Permian production as shale or light tight oil production. No doubt some tight oil is produced in the Permian but I think most Permian oil is conventional oil.

Total shale oil production from all six shale plays. However I believe perhaps one million barrels of this is conventional production.
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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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