Shale wells come on strong usually around 1800 to 2500 barrels per day for the first 90 days then it’s a decline curve we in the industry call it the wells Type curve. A “good” well in the Midland basin is a 2MMboe type curve. Which means over the 20 YEAR life time of that well it will ultimately produce 2,000,000 barrel of oil equivalent. Usually after the first 180 days or POP180 the bbl/day is still over 500 and slowly declining so that at a year or POP365 it’s down to 300_400 per day and it levels at at that rate for the next decade or two. I’m a operations and a developmental petroleum geologist I have personally drill thousands of Midland basin well over a decade and half of doing it. For the last two years two of the major operators I contract with have been DUC-ing wells. That means drilled and uncompleted. They are temporarily capped at the surface and can be worked over and have a frac job run on them in 9 to 14 days then they flow back for a week and get POPd all in less than a month. There is thousands of DUCd wells just sitting ready to be POPd when the price comes back up to justify putting them on production. There won’t be any shortage of West Texas oil at $60+ bbl there’s literally thousands of DUC and idle wells just waiting for prices to rise. That does not take into account stripper wells which number in the multi thousands that are idle rigit now or pumping the minimum lease obligations.
I hope you aren’t working in Lea or Eddy County, New Mexico. After all, that land out there could be a national park.
Good thing for Texas is wells are not on federal land.
Very Interesting. Where do you think US total barrels per day will be by 2nd quarter?
Also, is it possible to collect fracking crews so quickly after a price increase? What happened to all those workers over the last year?