With a Permian Well They Cried More, More, More - Looming Takeaway Constraints Out of the Hottest Shale Play

Drilling, well completions and multibillion-dollar investments in the Permian are being driven by the region’s potential for producing vast quantities of crude oil. But the Permian juggernaut isn’t only about crude — far from it. Over most of the past 12 months, the fastest-growing energy commodity in the Permian wasn’t crude oil, it was natural gas. And consider this: The U.S. play with the lowest breakeven prices for natural gas is not the Marcellus/Utica. It’s the Permian, where many of the most prolific areas have negative natural gas breakeven prices. And perhaps most important, constrained gas takeaway capacity poses a bigger threat to Permian crude production growth than constrained crude takeaway capacity, because if the gas produced in the play can’t be transported to market, crude production may need to be curtailed. Today we discuss highlights from RBN’s new Drill Down Report, which focuses on the all-important gas side of the U.S.’s hottest hydrocarbon production region.

Natural gas liquids production in the Permian Basin has doubled in the past four years, and may well double again by 2022. That rapid growth — driven by the pursuit of Permian crude oil and the resulting production of large volumes of NGL-rich associated gas — threatens to overwhelm the region’s existing gas processing and NGL-pipeline infrastructure. This is a big deal, because if there’s not enough gas processing and NGL takeaway capacity out of the Permian, exploration and production companies (E&Ps) in the U.S.’s hottest shale play would be forced to slow the pace of their development. Today we discuss highlights from our new Drill Down Report on Permian NGL production growth and the need for more NGL-related infrastructure.

Crude oil production in the Permian’s Midland and Delaware basins continues to rise, and producers in the red-hot shale play are hoping there will be enough pipeline takeaway capacity to handle all that growth. This is serious stuff—the Permian’s success the next few years will depend to a considerable degree on whether producers and the midstream sector can avoid the major constraint-driven price differentials between the Midland, TX hub, and destination markets like the Gulf Coast and Cushing, OK, that already have hit the Permian twice this decade. Today we discuss the prospects for another round of takeaway/price-differential trouble in the Permian as soon as late 2017/early 2018 and again in 2020-21.