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US Light Tight Oil (LTO) Update

May 22, 2018

US Light Tight Oil (LTO) Update

I have updated my scenarios for US LTO output, based on both EIA tight oil output data and average well profile data from Enno Peters’ shaleprofile.com. I have also created a scenario for the Niobrara shale oil play and for “other US LTO” which excludes the Permian Basin LTO, Eagle Ford, North Dakota Bakken/Three Forks, and the Niobrara.

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Niobrara play

The recent Niobrara wells have an estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) of 143 kb. The oil price scenario below is used for all of the scenarios.

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Well cost is assumed to be $4.5 million in 2017$. The scenario below assumes EUR starts to decrease in Jan 2019 as sweet spots become fully drilled. Economically recoverable resources (ERR) to 2040 are 2.7 Gb with 21,000 total oil wells completed, peak output is 623 kb/d in early 2021. Fewer wells are completed relative to the North Dakota Bakken and Permian basin because the wells are less profitable.

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Other US lto

For US other LTO, much of the output is from condensate from gas wells so the analysis is more approximate and a discounted cash flow analysis is beyond the scope of this post, the “average well” produces only about 38 kb over its life, but in many cases the output of natural gas makes the well profitable, there are some areas where shaleprofile.com does not have data such as the Anadarko basin, so I have simply taken the average well profile for areas covered (excluding ND Bakken, Eagle Ford, Permian and Niobrara) and then found the number of these “average wells” that fit US other LTO output data from the EIA(including Anadarko). The true average well profile for all areas including Anadarko is unknown.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Future of US Light Tight Oil (LTO)

March 5, 2017

The Future of US Light Tight Oil (LTO)

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The future output from the light tight oil (LTO) sector of the US oil industry is the subject of much speculation. Above I present some possible future output scenarios based on a simple model of US LTO, the scenarios are compared with the EIA’s 2017 Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) reference scenario with cumulative output of 82 Gb from 2001 to 2050. The cumulative output of the model scenarios is for the same period (2001-2050).

The models all use the same well profiles from 2006 to 2016 and are based on data gathered from Enno Peters excellent blog, shaleprofile.com. A preliminary hyperbolic profile was fit to the average LTO well data and then the parameters were fit using least squares and solver in Excel so that the model matched the data for output and number of wells added each month over the period from 2011 to 2015. The data for 2016 is incomplete and this leads to an under report of wells added for most of 2016 (from March through October). For this period the wells added were adjusted so that the model matched the output data from the EIA (which is more complete than the data reported at shaleprofile.com.)

The well profiles used are shown below, two were used, a lower profile for the early period and a higher well profile for the later period. The vertical axis is output in barrels per month and the horizontal axis is months from first output.

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The well profile in red (219 kb) is the basis for all the scenarios. In every case it is assumed that the estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) or total output from the well over its life starts to decrease in Feb 2017, but the rate of decrease varies from model to model, based on underlying assumptions and the number of new wells added each month.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shale Oil’s “Dirty Little Secret” Has Been Exposed

September 12, 2015

Shale Oil’s “Dirty Little Secret” Has Been Exposed

On Friday, on the way to diving into Goldman’s $20 crude call, we recapped our characterization of low crude prices as a battle between the Fed and the Saudis, a battle which is now manifesting itself in budget troubles in Riyadh and a concurrent FX reserve burn. Here’s what we said:

When Saudi Arabia killed the petrodollar late last year in a bid to bankrupt the US shale space and secure a bit of leverage over the Russians, the kingdom may or may not have fully understood the power of ZIRP and the implications that power had for struggling US producers. Thanks to the fact that ultra accommodative Fed policy has left capital markets wide open, the US shale space has managed to stay in business far longer than would otherwise have been possible in the face of slumping crude. That’s bad news for the Saudis who, after burning through tens of billions in FX reserves to help plug a yawning budget gap, have now resorted to tapping the very same accommodative debt markets that are keeping their competition in business as a fiscal deficit on the order of 20% of GDP looms large.

Still, as we went on to point out, it looks like the Saudis have dug in for the long haul here and the strain on non-OPEC production is starting to show as the IEA now says “the latest tumble in the price of oil is expected to cut non-OPEC supply in 2016 by nearly 0.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) – the biggest decline in more than two decades, as lower output in the United States, Russia and North Sea is expected to drop overall non-OPEC production to 57.7 mb/d.”

“US light tight oil, the driver of US growth, is forecast to shrink by 0.4 mb/d next year,” the agency adds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

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