Who's drilling the best unconventional wells in Lower 48? Time for an operator ranking! Here we're showing the top 25 best performing operators, based on average well performance since 2019. Lots of interesting details on here, let's dive in 👇
First, a little table-setting. This chart shows the average 12-month cumulative oil by current operator. 12 months is long enough to get a very good perspective on well productivity. Each operator here is colored by the basin that they primarily operate in, to give us an idea of WHERE this top performance has been occurring.
Starting at the top, we have only four operators breaking the 200,000 barrels in one year barrier: Kaiser Francis, Coterra, Franklin Mountain, and XCL. Of the four, Coterra is by far the biggest with 467 oil wells over this timeframe - impressive!
XCL Resources, focused on the Uinta Basin, is the big surprise up here for anyone not paying attention to the Uinta. It's the only non-Permian operator in the top 8, but its well performance stands with the best in Lower 48. XCL has been the main driver for the Uinta recently breaking 100,000 bbl/d from horizontal wells, quite the story.
14 of our top 25 here come from the Permian, with overrepresentation from the Delaware, but we do see strong performance from the Bakken, Utica, and Eagle Ford. Kraken from the Bakken (Williston Basin) and Ascent from the Utica (Appalachian Basin) show up at the tops of their basins, respectively.
A few large operators (more than 1k oil wells over this period) crack the list. Devon, ConocoPhillips, and Marathon all rate well here, with Exxon, EOG, and Pioneer just behind them. Of course, with a larger development area and more wells, it's harder to have tip-top performance simply due to the averaging out over a larger area. Kudos!
Anyone we should be looking at to crack into this list for the next 5 years, or any new basins? Let us know in the comments.
#oilgas #permian #bakken #uinta