Despite surging prices to the highest in almost a decade, natural gas operators in Pennsylvania are not blinking and they haven’t added more rigs.

This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

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These interactive presentations contain the latest gas (and a little oil) production data, from all 10,248 horizontal wells in Pennsylvania that started producing from 2010 onward, through July.

Total production

Natural gas production in Pennsylvania was flat month over month in August, at 20.3 Bcf/d (hz. wells only). Despite nearly decade natural gas prices, the number of wells that came online through July (302) is the lowest in over a decade.

Supply Projection

Already since June last year the number of rigs drilling horizontal wells in Pennsylvania has hovered around a level of 18 (according to Baker Hughes), even though natural gas prices have more than doubled since:

Horizontal rig count in Pennsylvania (left axis) and HH prices (dark curve, right axis)

Recently more wells have been completed than drilled, reducing the number of DUCs in the basin. But if drilling activity doesn’t increase from here, not much more can be expected to meet the increase in natural gas demand:

Tight gas outlook in Pennsylvania, based on current drilling activity & well productivity

This image was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard and it shows our projection for natural gas production in Pennsylvania, with the 18 rigs currently active, and assuming no changes in rig/well productivity.

Permit activity

In the following overview you can see how permit activity has evolved this year:

Permit activity in Pennsylvania, by month and by permit status (completed = spud)

Although you can see that a relatively high number of permits were approved in August (74) and September (54), it remains to be seen whether the trend is upwards.

Top operators

In the final tab (“Top operators”), the output and well locations of the top 8 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania are displayed.

Finally

Next week we will have a post on the US and one on North Dakota, which will release August production data in the coming days.

We keep improving our data coverage; now for several states (ND & TX) we already include stage count data in our data subscription, next to digital directional survey and completion data.

Production data is subject to revisions.

Sources

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
• FracFocus.org

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