Shale Oil Production and Decline

Hi gang, there has been a dearth of data to report on lately. But there is a lot of it coming next week. The new EIA Drilling Productivity Report that came out on October 22nd is due out again on the 12th of November. However that is the same day the latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is due out. I will publish a post on the latest data contained in the OPEC MOMR along with an update of all the charts on my OPEC Charts page. Then later that day, or perhaps the next, there will be an update on the new data from the Drilling Productivity Report. That is a lot to cram into even two days.

But the EIA’s latest International Energy Statistics with the data for July is past due. So I just emailed Patrica Smith, the EIA employee who publishes the report and asked her about it. Here is the exchange:

Patrica, sorry to bug you but do you have any idea when the next International Energy Statistics report will be released?

Hello Ron,

No bother at all….due to delays caused by the shutdown, and staffing and technical issues, the monthly update had been significantly delayed.  I just spoke with the database manager and he thinks that it will probably be November 14 at the latest.

 I apologize for any inconvenience that this is causing.

So there you have it. The whole shebang could come out within a couple of days of each other and possibly even on the same day. Then within a few days of that, likely on the 15th, the latest North Dakota Monthly Oil Production Statistics will be out with all the Bakken data for September.

But from the latest Drilling Productivity Report I have created a couple of charts. The first chart here is Total Oil From Six Shale Fields, The Bakken, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Marcellus, Niobrara, and Permian in barrels per day. The last two data points, October and November 2013 are the EIA’s estimate of what will be produced during these two months.

I don’t have any data to support it but I am almost sure that over one million barrels per day of their data is from conventional wells, most it from the Permian and Niobrara. But even the Bakken has two anticlines from which conventional oil is, or at least was, produced.

The below chart is the combined decline rate of the six fields in barrels per day per month. Now this is a little hard to understand but the best way to think about it is, if no new wells were to come on line then after one month production would be down by that amount. For November they expect all wells in these fields to decline by 199,127 barrels per day. That is if no new wells were to come on line in December then production would decline from 3,726,097 mb/d to 3,526,970 mb/d.

Another way to think about it is that all wells in these fields must increase production by almost 200,000 barrels per day just to break even. And that number is increasing by about 4,500 barrels per month.

New or additional wells must increase production by at least 200,000 barrels per day just to break even and currently they are increasing production by 250,000 to 260,000 barrels per day, increasing total production by 50,000 to 60,000 bp/d. But the decline rate is gaining and according to my calculations it should catch production in about 12 months.

5 Comments on "Shale Oil Production and Decline"

BillT on Fri, 8th Nov 2013 12:47 pm 



Either way, they are fracked…lol.

mo on Fri, 8th Nov 2013 1:54 pm 



If the price per barrel keeps falling it may be sooner then that

mike on Fri, 8th Nov 2013 3:39 pm 



Glad I invested all my money into these plays like the clever guys told me to do. Economy should improve any day now, and Fusion is just around the corner they say! just a few more years apparently!

shortonoil on Fri, 8th Nov 2013 6:54 pm 



Thanks for the post Ron.

Your estimate of about a year is in close agreement with ours, and you are using a different method of analysis than we are. Since these are primarily gas drive well, we assume that they are declining exponentially; nothing hyperbolic about them. Hyperbolic would assume that there is some other energy source driving them. Since the only possible source is the rock around the wells, and rock is a very poor heat conductor, to compensate for the temperature drop due to the de-pressurization it would take decades for the remaining gas to reheat. A little re-condensation may be possible in ten to twenty years.

Once these wells go into decline, drilling will probably slow as the cat will be out of the bag. Doubt if there will be much discussion about shale oil in five years.

J-Gav on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 1:36 pm 



“Doubt if there’ll be much discussion about shale oil in five years.”

Even if there is still some discussion, it won’t be the one we’re getting from the MSM at this point in time …