PPT Slide
Natural Gas Productive Capacity for the Lower-48 States
- Oklahoma is a good example of why the methodology was changed to estimate effective productive capacity and how the methodology works.
- Prior to the early 1990s, Oklahoma production was limited by neither wellhead capacity nor effective productive capacity, but by demand. More recently, production has been capacity limited with a utilization of 95 percent or more. During the late 1980’s, when effective productive capacity surpluses existed, annual production was rising and there were substantive seasonal variations as demand changed during the year (Figure 3).
- U.S. production and demand have been slightly increasing in most recent years, but Oklahoma production was declining even with a surplus demonstrated wellhead capacity of 15 to 25 percent (Figure 3).
- The fact that Oklahoma’s production did not grow during this period, but declined, indicates that production was not limited by wellhead productive capacity, but by a lower effective productive capacity.
- For Oklahoma the effective productive capacity was found to be about 83 percent of the demonstrated wellhead capacity.
- In Oklahoma, as in other areas, the relative impact of field processing equipment, limitations from gathering and pipeline systems, limited compression capability, and natural gas plant throughput capabilities varied across the State and over time.