NOTE: The Drilling Productivity Report does not incorporate any weather events into its estimates, and we will capture any drops in production due to severely cold weather in future editions.

Our data vendor for oil and gas production data, Enverus, reported a change in the Texas Railroad Commission’s (TX RRC) methodology for reporting natural gas production that discontinued applying a “well separation extraction loss factor” to condensate production reported by operators. For example, the impact of the methodology change lowers TX RRC reported natural gas gross production by 914 million cubic feet per day, nearly 3% in the month of January 2022. The December Drilling Productivity Report released on December 18, 2023, reflects this revision.

The Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) rig productivity metric new-well oil/natural gas production per rig can become unstable during periods of rapid decreases or increases in the number of active rigs and well completions. The metric uses a fixed ratio of estimated total production from new wells divided by the region's monthly rig count, lagged by two months. The metric does not represent new-well oil/natural gas production per newly completed well.

The DPR metric legacy oil/natural gas production change can become unstable during periods of rapid decreases or increases in the volume of well production curtailments or shut-ins. This effect has been observed during winter weather freeze-offs, extreme flooding events, and the 2020 global oil demand contraction. The DPR methodology involves applying smoothing techniques to most of the data series because of inherent noise in the data.