NOTE:
This month’s Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) has two significant changes to improve the coverage and quality of the analysis.

First, the DPR is expanding to include the Anadarko region, consistent with DPR’s aim to cover the most prolific and active on-shore regions where oil and natural gas are produced from shales and other tight resources. In the recent years the Anadarko region, which includes 24 Oklahoma and 5 Texas counties, has become the target of many producers using improved drilling and completion technology to this already well-established oil and gas producing basin. As of July 2017, there are 129 operating rigs in the Anadarko region, second to only Permian region with 373 operating rigs.

Second, the DPR will henceforth present data for the Marcellus and Utica regions as a combined Appalachia region. With the increasing number of wells in Pennsylvania being drilled into the Utica formation and some wells in Ohio producing from the Marcellus shale, the previous regional definitions based on surface boundaries are becoming less meaningful, especially where the two plays overlap. Furthermore, combining the relatively small number of active rigs across the broader Appalachia region should improve the precision of our productivity estimates. State-level production data will continue to be provided through EIA’s monthly survey of operators in major producing states, including, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Supplemental DPR data for the Anadarko and Appalachia region, including DUC data, are being provided starting this month. Also, in order to preserve continuity of existing data series for the Marcellus and Utica regions as previously delineated, EIA will continue to provide data for those regions until further notice. Note that rig productivity, legacy well declines, and most recent production estimates for the combined Appalachia region, which are developed using analysis for all of its wells taken together, will not necessarily equal the sum of corresponding values shown for the component Utica and Marcellus regions.

Beyond the two changes being implemented in this month’s edition, EIA will continue to pursue further improvements to the DPR. Another improvement planned over the next few months will be to make DPR data available through EIA’s Application Programming Interface (API), which should enable users of the data to more easily update their own spreadsheets and analyses as new monthly data is issued.