Annual Reserve Revisions Part IV: Shale Producers
EIA Liquids Reserve Estimates
This follows on from Part I, which looked at EIA reserves and revision estimates for US as a whole and the GoM, and concentrates on the on-shore tight oil and (below)gas producing regions.
The EIA issues revision data by whole states or state districts rather than by basin, so some of the reserves and production, but a small proportion, will be from conventional reservoirs. It does give total reserves for each shale basin but not the changes, and I didn’t go to the trouble of pro-rating everything against that. Its data only goes through 2019; the 2020 update will be out in December or January.
The regions for each basins used are Permian – Texas Districts 7C, 8 and 8A and East New Mexico; Bakken – North Dakota and Montana; Eagle Ford – Texas Districts 1, 2, 3 and 4 Onshore; Niobara – Colorado; Marcelus – Pennsylvania and West Virginia; Utica – Ohio; Haynesville – Louisiana South Onshore and Texas District 6; Barnett – Texas Districts 5, 7B and 9; Woodford – Oklahoma ; Fayetteville – Arkansas.
Remaining reserves are for crude, condensate and NGL, which is easier to include here given the way EIA presents its data. Totalled for all the basins these may have peaked in 2019, they were levelling off from 2018 and will certainly fall significantly in 2020.
Production was aggressively increasing in 2019, coming mainly from the Permian, but will fall in 2020, and given shale dynamics, a concurrent peak with reserves is not unlikely.
Cumulative adjustments and revisions turned negative in 2019 and I expect will show a major decline for 2020, which may well not be fully recovered even if prices rise significantly. To me this indicates that estimates for recovery factors were over-estimated originally and are gradually being corrected…
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