(Platts Gas Daily - November 7, 2013) EIA report not your father’s production model (By: Jim Magill)
The Drilling Productivity Report covers the Marcellus, Haynesville, Eagle Ford, Bakken and Niobrara shales, as well as the Permian Basin. It includes metrics on new-well production, legacy production, projected month-over-month output changes and total field production.
EIA touts the report as a key piece in a multi-faceted puzzle that drillers, analysts and investors need these days to model their current and future production and reserves. “The industry has always had a need for up-to-date data on drilling activity,” Lynn Westfall, EIA’s director of energy markets and financial analysis, said in an interview.
But industry officials and observers say that while the EIA data is helpful on some levels, it merely complements their own proprietary modeling strategies.
Rusty Braziel, president and principal energy markets consultant for RBN Energy, said analysts like himself, rather than producers, are likely to benefit the most from the new EIA report.
“Most producers have been looking at this data all along. It’s the rest of us who have not. What EIA has done is spotlight the fact that there’s a lot of data out there that can be used by the rest of us to understand what productivity improvements the producers are seeing,” he said.
“The reason why we’re seeing gas production increasing at the current price level is producers continue to get more and more productive. In the new EIA report, you can see just how much more productive they’re becoming,” Braziel commented.
