DUCs

Faced with sustained sub-$2/MMBtu natural gas prices and dim prospects for significant gas-demand growth until sometime next year, a number of major gas-focused E&Ps have been tapping the brakes on production and trimming their planned 2024 capex. But one company — Chesapeake Energy, slated to become the U.S.’s largest gas producer thanks to a recently announced acquisition — has taken a more dramatic step, implementing a novel strategy that will slash production by 25% but leave the E&P ready to quickly ramp up its output as soon as demand and prices warrant. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll review the 2024 guidance of the major U.S. gas producers and delve into the analysis of Chesapeake’s unusual approach. 

Brutal arctic cold may have chilled broad swaths of the U.S. last month, but the scorching pace of upstream M&A activity continued to be red hot, with nearly $20 billion in deals announced in January after a record-setting 2023. Last year’s transaction value totaled an astounding $192 billion, a mark 79% higher than the previous 10-year high and more than the previous three years combined. Why the surge? A wide range of factors influenced corporate decisions to grow through acquisitions rather than organic investment, including commodity prices, equity values, debt levels, operating costs, and production trends. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll analyze M&A trends through several statistical lenses and provide some insights into 2024 activity. 

U.S. crude oil production has doubled in the past eight years, from 5.5 MMb/d in 2010 to a record 11.0 MMb/d this month — an astonishing 9% compound annual growth rate. But there’s more to the Shale Revolution than higher production. Its most noteworthy characteristic may be a newfound market responsiveness that U.S. production volumes have to price, in which U.S. producers flex their “sweet spots” and an at-the-ready inventory of drilled-but-uncompleted wells (DUCs) that can be ramped up when prices warrant and pulled back when they don’t. This newfound flexibility has profoundly changed the role of the U.S. in global markets. In today’s blog, we take a big-picture look at crude oil production growth, the special ability of U.S. producers to respond to shifts in crude pricing, and the potential for the U.S. to have a stabilizing role in global markets.

The latest Drilling Productivity Report from the EIA, released yesterday (February 13, 2017), shows that while the combined rig count in the seven major U.S. shale plays rose about 25% in the fourth quarter of 2016 versus the previous quarter, and the number of wells drilled was up 29%, well completions were up a paltry 1%, leading to an increase in the inventory of drilled-but-uncompleted wells (DUCs). Completions accelerated a bit in January 2017, but DUCs still continued to rise. That certainly seems counterintuitive.  With crude oil prices stable in the low $50’s over the past few months you might think that producers would be pulling DUCs out of inventory, and in fact there have been statements to that effect in several producer investor calls. This is not just an exercise in energy fundamentals numerology. If the DUC inventory is increasing, then production will not be ramping up as fast as the growing rig count would imply. But what if, as some early signs indicate, the historical relationships are out of whack and the DUC inventory isn’t growing but rather declining? In that case, forecast models could be understating the outlook for production growth, and the market could be in for a more rapid and steeper rebound in oil and gas production than many expect. In today’s blog, we delve into the DUC inventory data and its potential upside risk to production forecasts.

The inventory of drilled-and-uncompleted wells (DUCs) in the U.S. Lower 48 grew by nearly 1,900 between the months just before oil prices and rig counts collapsed and early 2016—a 50% increase in a roughly two-year period, according to new DUCs data in the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) September Drilling Productivity Report (DPR—See the DPR DUC report here.). Since January’s peak of nearly 5,600 DUCs, producers have been working down the national inventory of DUCs, with the DPR showing the overall count closer to 5,000 as of August (2016) ––but that is still up more than 1,300 from the December EIA’s 2013 baseline. This incremental growth in the number of “dormant” wells is key to understanding and predicting how long production can remain supported or grow in a low-rig count environment. Moreover, there are regional differences in the DUCs inventory counts and trends that provide critical insights on how various market factors are impacting drilling activity. Today, we walk through the EIA DUCs data for each of the producing regions.

At long last, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has reported an “official” estimate of the U.S. drilled-and-uncompleted well (DUC) inventory as part of its monthly Drilling Productivity Report.  DUCs are a critical factor in forecasting production trends, as many of these wells are likely to be some of the first to come online as soon as prices move higher and thus have the potential to boost production quicker and easier than would otherwise be the case. However, the number of DUCs has been a difficult thing to measure, though not for lack of trying. There are, in fact, widely varying counts from many different sources circulating in the industry. Today, we begin a short series on these latest DUC counts and their potential implications.