2021 Production from Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Wells

The scatter plot of the production of conventional wells by age looks a little different. The first difference that sticks out is the scale, as this is measured in Mcf rather than Bcf, and the scale showing the number of days is much greater as well. The oldest well here is listed at 44,561 days, which works out to January 1, 1900. This seems like it was probably entered as a dummy date somewhere along the way. Figure 1 shows us that the mean gas production for these wells is 1,207 Mcf (about 1.2 MMcf), which is just barely off of the bottom margin of the graph.

There are a couple of other notable features about this scatter plot. The distribution shows a cluster of wells that are around 5,000 days old, with a noticeable vertical grouping around that age. This is probably accurate – while conventional drilling didn’t entirely stop with the arrival of the unconventional drilling practices, it has dropped off precipitously. Just 15 wells out of 21,580 producing conventional wells in this chart were drilled in 2021.

Exactly one conventional well had production higher than the average unconventional well; the Babcock 1 well in Swissvale, Allegheny County and operated by R Harris Gas & Oil Inc produced 854 MMcf, or about four times as much gas as the runner-up in the category. Sharp-eyed readers might note that this production value does not appear on Figure 3, above. This is because it does not have a spud date in the dataset, so the exact age of the well could not be calculated. We did look this well up on eFACTS, and found that this well was first permitted way back in 1995. If they started drilling right away, it would be 9,853 days old as of January 1, 2022. The production figure stands out far enough that we checked the 2020 production report, where the same well reported producing around 872 MMcf, so perhaps it is just an extreme outlier and not an error.

And finally, there seems to be a strange blip with several wells reporting around 100 million cubic feet. There are 14 wells reporting exactly that amount. Of these, 10 have the operator listed as “Hollobaugh Paul A,” three are “Copeland Gas LLC,” and one is “Elder Oil & Gas Co.” Some of these wells date as far back as 1950, while several more have unknown spud dates. We wonder if it might be worth checking those gas meters to make sure they are operating properly.