Tag Archive for: Pennsylvania

Approaching 10K Unconventional Wells in PA
Matt Kelso, BA

How Many MS Permits Are There in PA?

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People interested in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale data frequently ask me what they think is a relatively straightforward question: how many drilling permits are there for Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania? As it happens, this is actually a somewhat complicated question, as there are numerous paths to finding the answer, all of which will lead to a different result. Consider, for example:

  • If you go to the Well Permit Workload Report for the week ending 1/20/12, the answer is provided for you: 9,883. But…
  • …if you search the Permits Issued Detail Report using the same end date, you will be given the result since the year 2000 as 9,868.
  • The above item is particularly confusing when you realize that it consists of 11,209 rows of data. No problem, you say, I’ll just use my Excel skills to pivot the data by it’s unique API number, and as of today’s data we’re down to a mere 9,880 (plus two items with the wrong numerical formatting altogether).

So which number is right? In my opinion, none of them. If you follow the API link above, you will see that there are serveral components to the API number, which generally is in the format AB-CDE-FGHIJ-KL-MN, where each letter is represented by a digit ranging from 0 to 9. Here’s what they mean:

  • “AB” represents the state code. In Pennsylvania, the code is “37”, but it is not included on the DEP dataset.
  • “CDE” is the county code, which is alphabetical, and starts at 001. So for example, Allegheny County has a code of 003, since it is near the start of the alphabet, while Washington County is 125, which is near the end.
  • “FGHIJ” is the unique well indicator. In theory, this allows for 100,000 wells per county to each have their own number. If you count the distinct combination of county codes and unique well indicators, there were 8,942 well permits as of 1-20.
  • “KL” indicates the directional sidetrack code. This could represent multiple horizontal components of a well, so there is some wiggle room for argument if you want to consider each horizontal segment to be its own well. I argue against it, as the language talks about there being numerous horizontal components to a well, but for the record if you include it, then the number is 9,638.
  • “MN” represents the event sequence code, which includes modifications to existing wells that also require permit actions. The number of distinct Marcellus Shale permits if you were to include the directional sidetrack and event sequence code would be 9,878 as of the 20th of January.

So…which number is right?  My interpretation of what the code means is that to count the number of wells in any given state, you should include all of the three digit county codes and all of the five digit unique well indicators (or “CDE-FGHIJ”, as described above.)  As of January 20th, that number was 8,942 for Marcellus Shale well permits in Pennsylvania, and as of today, that number is 9,005.

Sometime this year, I expect that the number of total Marcellus Shale permits in Pennsylvania to top the 10,000 mark.  But if that claim comes within the next week or two, my opinion is that it isn’t an accurate representation of the data–even if the claim comes from the DEP itself.

The following charts contain data through the end of January 2012.  The first is based on 11,297 permit actions (or records on the permit report), while the second is classified by unique 8 digit well API numbers.

Matt Kelso, BA

PA Oil and Gas Inspection Data Available

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The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has updated their delivery mechanism of violation data, and it is now possible to search all inspections, including those that do not result in violations. To test it out, I downloaded all oil and gas inspection data from January 1, 2011 to January 16, 2012. Here is a summary of the results from that query:

While the vast majority of instances where no violations were issued were recorded in Column F, it seemed likely to me that no violations would have been issued for any category in rows D through I, so I aggregated those columns and divided by the total number of inspections.

According to the report instructions, the report was intended to include only those violations that resulted in a violation, but the final compliance report does allow for seeing all results. This is a very good thing, a it provides us with another way to evaluate the various operators within industry.

Before I present that data for the Marcellus Shale operators, I should point out a source of skew: When an inspection yields more than one violation, there are multiple entries for the actual inspection. For example, if one inspection yielded ten violations, this analysis would look at it as ten inspections, each of which yielded one violation. Clearly, that would distort the actual number of inspections with violations downward, resulting in more favorable scores for any operator with multiple violations on any one inspection. That in mind, let’s consider the following results to be preliminary.  Still, it is useful in combination with the violations per well and violations per million cubic feet of production metrics to triangulate in on the operators’ culture of compliance.

FracTracker Alliance

Animating Data: A Different Way to Look at Marcellus Shale Drilling

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by Josh Knauer, CEO of Rhiza

At Rhiza, we love to experiment with new ways of visualizing data that help tell better data stories. In most of our work environments, using data is kind of difficult and visualizing is usually left to data experts. We’d love to see a future where sharing data visualizations (maps, charts, explanations, etc) is as easy as recording and sharing a video on YouTube. Not everything produced will be stellar in quality, but at least we’ll all be a lot further down the road towards breaking down the traditional data silos and moving data aggregation and visualization solely out of the hands of database admins and graphic designers. We’ll still need those folks, their jobs will just get a lot more fun!

To this end, when I saw a data animation created by John Detwiler that showed the spread of drilled Marcellus shale gas wells in Bradford County, I wanted to create my own data animation telling the same story, but for the entire state of Pennsylvania… Read more»

Matt Kelso, BA

Updated Drilled Wells Data for PA

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Three drilled wells datasets for Pennsylvania have been updated or created, including:

The last of the three datasets is the most unique, with data spatially joined to municipalities. The following two maps exhibit the Marcellus Shale related data that they contain:


Number of Marcellus Shale wells per PA municipalities as of December 16, 2011. Click the gray compass rose and double carat (^) to hide those menus. Then click the information tool (the blue “i”) then any map feature for more information.


Number of Marcellus Shale wells in PA municipalities per square mile, as of December 16, 2011. Area calculation performed in PA State Plane South.

Bradford County PA Wells Drilled Animation
FracTracker Alliance

Bradford County Wells Drilled Animation

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One of the regular users, John Detwiler, recently took the mapping application that is part of the platform to an even greater level. He exported wells drilled data by year into Google Earth to create an animation of the shale gas wells drilled from 2007-11 in Bradford County, PA. Check it out:

Gas leases in Dryden NY
FracTracker Alliance

Gas Lease Review by the New York Times

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Gas leases in the southeastern corner of the Town of Dryden (approximately).

Example lease map. Source: LivinginDryden.org

 

The New York Times has collected more than 111,000 oil and gas leases and related documents through open records requests. Over 100,000 of the documents in the archive are from Tarrant County, Tex., roughly 3,200 are from New York, and the remainder are from states including Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

To see all of the leases that have been collected by the New York Times, click here.

 

Some quick tidbits about what they found:

  • Fewer than half the leases require companies to compensate landowners for water contamination after drilling begins. And only about half the documents have language that lawyers suggest should be included to require payment for damages to livestock or crops.
  • Most leases grant gas companies broad rights to decide where they can cut down trees, store chemicals, build roads and drill. Companies are also permitted to operate generators and spotlights through the night near homes during drilling.
  • In the leases, drilling companies rarely describe to landowners the potential environmental and other risks that federal laws require them to disclose in filings to investors.
  • Most leases are for three or five years, but at least two-thirds of those reviewed by The Times allow extensions without additional approval from landowners.
Matt Kelso, BA

Violations per Well by Operator Over Time

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The following chart contains all operators that have either drilled a Marcellus Shale well in Pennsylvania from March 6, 2006 to November 27, 2011, or have been issued a Marcellus Shale related violation by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection between January 1, 2008 and September 30, 2011. Results are cumulative, thereby reflecting each company’s legacy with the Marcellus Shale, rather than their performances for any given year. The Violations per Well (VpW) score has been color coded for easy reference, with the following scale:

Most companies that are issued violations are well operators, although there do seem to be some midstream companies on the violation list. This might account for some of the blue “No wells” below, but mostly they reflect operators that were not yet active. For example, Antero Resource’s first well was in 2010, so entries for 2008 and 2009 read as “No wells”.

Whenever we look at Marcellus operators over time, the changes in companies has to be dealt with in some way. In this case, I took a minimalist approach: while East Resources, Inc. and East Resources, Llc. were combined, I did not merge name changes that were more substantial than that. For example, even though CNX Gas and Consol Gas are both owned by Consol, I did not merge the two. Another example is St. Mary Land and Exploration changed its name to SM Energy, and those two entries were left unchanged. Because of all of the changes within the industry, I have included the most recent drill date, so that viewers can determine if the drillers are still active.

Matt Kelso, BA

PA Data Updates, New DataTool Charting Functionality

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Several oil and gas datasets from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) have been updated on the FracTracker DataTool, including:

Additionally, a Pennsylvania zip code dataset from the US Census has been added, but it appears to have some errors, with some zip codes inside Pennsylvania missing, and some outside of the border included.

PA zip codes. Please click the “i” tool then any map feature for more information.

Also, Rhiza Labs, the software developer of our DataTool, has been working hard to add new charting functionality to their Upshot platform. Any data that is classified as numeric upon upload can be charted. Play around with it, and let us know what you think.

Matt Kelso, BA

January to August Marcellus Shale Violations by Operator

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The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Oil and Gas maintains violation data on their website (download the Excel file). The following is a summary of Marcellus Shale violations issued in the first eight months of this year, including the number of wells that were flagged for violations.


Marcellus Shale violations and offending wells in Pennsylvania: January – August, 2011

Matt Kelso, BA

Marcellus Shale Production Decline Over Time in Pennsylvania

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There are now three different Marcellus Shale production reports available on FracTracker’s DataTool:

The production data, which is self-reported by the drilling operators, is also available from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

In this post, we will explore the change in production from the 756 Marcellus Shale wells that reported positive (nonzero) production on each of the three reports. Of these, exactly 300 were flagged as horizontal wells on the most recent report, leaving 456 to be classified as vertical wells.

PA Marcellus Shale Production: 1-11 to 6-11 (large)
Marcellus Shale production in Pennsylvania from January to June, 2011. Please click the image to see a zoomable and dynamic map.
Caveats
It is important to note that the first of the three production cycles is for a one year period, while the other two are for six months each.  Luckily, each report includes not only production in thousands of cubic feet (Mcf), but also the number of days for which each well was in production.  Therefore, we can look at the data in terms of thousands of cubic feet per day (McfPD), which solves not only the 12 month vs. 6 month problem, but also makes sure that we aren’t comparing six months of production to just a handful of days.

One important factor that this analysis does not account for, however, is when the well first entered production. This is significant, because gas wells typically have a very high initial production, which falls steeply in the months and years ahead. This produces a hyperbolic decline curve, such as this Department of the Interior graph found on Wikipedia.

In this case, we only know that the initial production was some time since 2006 and before June 30, 2010. Add to that fact that there are only three date ranges, and the result is definitely not a proper decline curve.

Results
However, there are results, and they do show decline over time. Interestingly, there are some differences to note between horizontal and vertical Marcellus Shale wells.


Average Marcellus Shale production in thousands of cubic feet (Mcf) for wells on all three production reports.


Average Marcellus Shale production showing rates of decline.

The overall production of the sample decreased 40.7 percent from the period ending June 2010 to the one ending one year later.  Interestingly, the vertical wells are declining at a sharper rate than horizontal wells, although not dramatically so.

The chart also highlights the amazing difference in production that horizontal drilling provides to Marcellus Shale wells, with average production values 5.6 to 6.9 times higher than their vertical counterparts.

What’s Missing?
Not all of the Marcellus Shale wells from the July ’09 to June ’10 list were still reporting production for the period that ended one year later. These wells were not included in the above analysis, but are interesting in their own right:


Number of Marcellus Shale wells on the production report for the period ending June 2010 that are also reporting production one year later.

Surprisingly, the rate for horizontal wells no longer producing gas is more than twice as high as their vertical counterparts.  Does this mean that a side effect of horizontal drilling is a shorter well production life, as all of the gas is extracted faster?  We’ll have to wait and see what future data shows to find out.