US oil supplies are at a 36½ year low, Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at a 39 year low; oil + oil products supplies are at an 18½ year low; DUCs rose in November for the first time in 29 months
Oil prices finished higher for a second straight week and recovered all of the losses that followed the December 5th EU ban on seaborne imports of Russian crude and the G7 price cap on Russian oil, as China's Covid reopening continued, US oil inventories dropped, and Russia threatened to cut its crude output...after rising 4.6% to $74.29 a barrel last week after an oil leak shut down the Keystone pipeline supplying diluted Canadian bitumen, a replacement for Russian oil, to US refineries, the contract price for the benchmark US light sweet crude for January delivery rose more than 1% in Asian trading on Monday, as optimism for a recovery of the Chinese economy outweighed concern over a global recession, and settled Monday's weak New York trading session 90 cents or 1.2% higher at $75,19 a barrel, as oil traders saw President Xi Jinping’s pledge to focus on the economy as supporting energy demand, even as Chinese Covid cases surged...oil prices rose again in early trade on Tuesday, shored up by a weaker dollar and a U.S. plan to restock its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and again settled 90 cents higher at $76.09 a barrel after paring earlier stronger gains, as a worsening outlook for a major U.S. winter storm sparked fears that millions of Americans might curb travel plans during the holidays, while the more-active US benchmark crude-oil contract for February delivery finished 85 cents or 1.1% higher at $76.23 a barrel, helped by a weaker dollar that made overseas purchases of dollar-denominated crude more attractive to foreign buyers...with trading in January oil closed, the price of February oil extended its gains in after hous trading Tuesday evening, after the American Petroleum Institute reported a surprise draw from US crude supplies, and then rose in early trading on Wednesday due to an uptick in demand, after EIA data had revealed that US crude stockpiles had fallen more than anticipated last week, and finished $2.06 or 2.7% higher at $78.29 a barrel, boosted by hopes that China would further relax Covid-19 curbs after no new COVID-19 deaths were reported....oil prices rose for a fourth straight day in early trading on Thursday, with U.S. crude, heating oil and jet fuel supplies all seen tight just as a chilly blast were hitting the US and travel was set to soar for the holidays, but then turned lower and fell by around $1 a barrel in volatile trade as the impact of tighter U.S. crude stocks due to the winter storm was outweighed by fears that Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and China's rising COVID-19 cases would dent demand. before settling the session 80 cents lower at $77.49 a barrel amid risk-off sentiment in broader markets as Wall Street stocks sold off and the U.S. dollar strengthened in afternoon trading....however, oil prices reversed and rose $1 in Asian trading Friday, in expectation of a fall in supply of Russian crude. which helped to assuage fears of a hit to demand in the US due to the Arctic storm, and then rallied in pre-holiday trade to settled $2.07 higher at $79.56 a barrel after Moscow said it might cut crude output in response to the G7 price cap on Russian exports...oil prices thus finished the week 7.1% higher, while the contract price for US light sweet crude for February delivery, which had finished last week at $74.46 a barrel, ended 6.8% higher...
On the other hand, natural gas prices finished lower for the third time in four weeks, as traders looked past the Christmas cold spell to forecasts for warming weather to start the new year...after rising 5.7% to $6.600 per mmBTU last week on the potential for much colder weather for the rest of December, the contract price of US natural gas for January delivery opened at $6.111/mmBTU, down more than 7% from Friday’s closing price, as weekend forecasts turned unseasonably warm after the Christmas holiday, and continued falling to settle 74.9 cents, of more than 11% lower at $5.851 per mmBTU, as the weather outlook for later this month and early next pointed to milder conditions and easing demand...natural gas prices continued to tumble on Tuesday, falling another 52.5 cents or 9% to a seven week low of $5.326 per mmBTU, as traders looked past bitter cold and blizzards this week and fixated on forecasts for unseasonably mild conditions to close out 2022 and to start the new year...natural gas prices eked out a tiny gain on Wednesday, amid worries that a fierce and widespread winter freeze could force production interruptions, and ended the three-day run of steep losses by rising six-tenths of a cent to $5.332 per mmBTU...natural gas prices turned lower again on Thursday after the EIA reported a smaller-than-expected draw from gas storage last week and settled down 33.3 cents at a two month low of $4.999 per mmBTU...natural gas prices finally turned higher on Friday, as extreme cold boosted spot prices to their highest level in years across much of the US, and cut gas output to a nine-month low by freezing oil and gas wells in Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, as prices finished 8.0 cents higher at $5.079 per mmBTU, but still ended 23.0% lower for the week...
The EIA's natural gas storage report for the week ending December 16th indicated that the amount of working natural gas held in underground storage in the US fell by 87 billion cubic feet to 3,325 billion cubic feet by the end of the week, which meant our gas supplies were 45 billion cubic feet, or 1.3% less than the 3,370 billion cubic feet that were in storage on December 16th of last year, but 22 billion cubic feet, or 0.7% more than the five-year average of 3,303 billion cubic feet of natural gas that were in storage as of the 16th of December over the most recent five years....the 87 billion cubic foot withdrawal from US natural gas working storage for the cited week was less than the average forecast for a 93 billion cubic feet withdrawal by a Reuters poll of analysts, but much more than the 60 billion cubic feet that were pulled from natural gas storage during the corresponding week of 2021, but still much less than the average 124 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have typically been withdrawn from our natural gas storage during the same winter week over the past 5 years...
The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA
US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending December 16th indicated that after a big drop in our oil imports and a decrease in the amount of those mysterious oil supplies that could not be accounted for, we needed to pull oil out of our stored commercial crude supplies for the 5th time in 6 weeks, and for the 16th time in the past 35 weeks, despite another sizable release of oil from the SPR....Our imports of crude oil fell by an average of 1,048,000 barrels per day to average 5,819,000 barrels per day, after rising by an average of 855,000 barrels per day during the prior week, while our exports of crude oil rose by 44,000 barrels per day to average 4,360,000 barrels per day, which together meant that the net of our trade in oil worked out to an import average of 1,459,000 barrels of oil per day during the week ending December 16th, 1,092,000 fewer barrels per day than the net of our imports minus our exports during the prior week.. Over the same period, production of crude from US wells was reportedly unchanged at 12,100,000 barrels per day, and hence our daily supply of oil from the net of our international trade in oil and from domestic well production appears to have averaged a total of 13,559,000 barrels per day during the December 16th reporting week…
Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 15,976,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending December 16th, an average of 150,000 fewer barrels per day than the amount of oil that our refineries processed during the prior week, while over the same period the EIA’s surveys indicated that a net average of 1,363,000 barrels of oil per day were being pulled out of the supplies of oil stored in the US. So, based on that reported & estimated data, the crude oil figures from the EIA for the week ending December 16th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from oilfield production, and from storage was 1,054,000 barrels per day less than what our oil refineries reported they used during the week. To account for that obvious disparity between the apparent supply of oil and the apparent disposition of it, the EIA just inserted a (+1,054,000) barrel per day figure onto line 13 of the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet in order to make the reported data for the daily supply of oil and for the consumption of it balance out, a fudge factor that they label in their footnotes as “unaccounted for crude oil”, thus suggesting there must have been an omission or error of that magnitude in this week’s oil supply & demand figures that we have just transcribed....moreover, since last week’s “unaccounted for crude oil” was at (+2,259,000) barrels per day, that means there was a 1,204,000 barrel per day difference between this week's balance sheet error and the EIA's crude oil balance sheet error from a week ago, and hence the changes to supply and demand from that week to this one that are indicated by this week's report are off by that much, thus rendering those comparisons virtually meaningless.... however, since most everyone treats these weekly EIA reports as gospel, and since these figures often drive oil pricing, and hence decisions to drill or complete oil wells, we’ll continue to report this data just as it's published, and just as it's watched & believed to be reasonably accurate by most everyone in the industry...(for more on how this weekly oil data is gathered, and the possible reasons for that “unaccounted for” oil, see this EIA explainer)….
This week's 1,363,000 barrel per day decrease in our overall crude oil inventories left our oil supplies at 796,858,000 barrels at the end of the week, which was our lowest total oil inventory level since January 17th, 1986, and therefore at a new 36 1/2 year low....Our oil inventories decreased this week as an average of 842,000 barrels per day were being pulled out of our commercially available stocks of crude oil, while 521,000 more barrels per day of oil were being pulled out of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That draw on the SPR was an extension of the emergency withdrawal under Biden's "Plan to Respond to Putin’s Price Hike at the Pump" (sic), that was originally intended to supply 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day to commercial interests over a six month period from its inception to the midterm elections in November, in the hope of keeping gasoline and diesel fuel prices from rising over that time....The SPR withdrawals under that program began fluctuating during the summer because the administration had also been attempting to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to manipulate prices on a weekly basis; furthermore, Biden recently announced another 15,000,000 barrel release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to run thru December, while simultaneously announcing he'd buy crude to replenish the SPR if oil prices fall to or below the $67-72 a barrel range, effectively putting a floor under oil at that price.....Including the administration's initial 50,000,000 million barrel SPR release earlier this year, their subsequent 30,000,000 barrel release, and other withdrawals from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve under recent release programs, a total of 277,523,000 barrels of oil have now been removed from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the past 29 months, and as a result the 378,624,000 barrels of oil that still remain in our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now the lowest since December 30th, 1983, or nearly at a 39 year low, as repeated tapping of our emergency supplies for non-emergencies or to pay for other programs had already drained those supplies considerably over the past dozen years, even before the Biden administration's SPR releases. The total 180,000,000 barrel drawdown of the current Biden release program, still scheduled to run through December, will have released almost a third of what remained in the SPR when the program started, and leaves us with what is less than a 20 day supply of oil at the current consumption rate...
Further details from the weekly Petroleum Status Report (pdf) indicate that the 4 week average of our oil imports fell to an average of 6,184,000 barrels per day last week, which was 4.0% less than the 6,442,000 barrel per day average that we were importing over the same four-week period last year. This week’s crude oil production was reported to be unchanged at 12,100,000 barrels per day as the EIA's rounded estimate of the output from wells in the lower 48 states was unchanged at 11,700,000 barrels per day, while Alaska’s oil production was 6,000 barrels per day lower at 450,000 barrels per day but had no impact on the rounded national total....US crude oil production had reached a pre-pandemic high of 13,100,000 barrels per day during the week ending March 13th 2020, so this week’s reported oil production figure was still 7.6% below that of our pre-pandemic production peak, but was 24.7% above the pandemic low of 9,700,000 barrels per day that US oil production had fallen to during the third week of February of 2021...
US oil refineries were operating at 90.2% of their capacity while using those 15,976,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending December 16th, down from their 92.2% utilization rate during the prior week, a normal utilization rate for mid December...The 15,976,000 barrels per day of oil that were refined this week were still 1.0% more than the 15,818,000 barrels of crude that were being processed daily during week ending December 17th of 2021, while 5.9% less than the 16,980,000 barrels that were being refined during the prepandemic week ending December 20th, 2019, when our refinery utilization was at 93.3%, as refinery utilization typically rises in late December ...
Even with the decrease in the amount of oil being refined this week, gasoline output from our refineries was quite a bit higher, increasing by 358,000 barrels per day to 9,552,000 barrels per day during the week ending December 16th, after our gasoline output had increased by 129,000 barrels per day during the prior week. This week’s gasoline production was still 3.9% less than the 9,942,000 barrels of gasoline that were being produced daily over the same week of last year, and 7.0% below the gasoline production of 10,269,000 barrels per day during the prepandemic week ending December 20th, 2019. On the other hand, our refineries’ production of distillate fuels (diesel fuel and heat oil) decreased by 66,000 barrels per day to 5,102,000 barrels per day, after our distillates output had decreased by 164,000 barrels per day during the prior week. But even with those decreases, our distillates output was still 5.2% more than the 4,852,000 barrels of distillates that were being produced daily during the week ending December 17th of 2021, while 6.3% less than the 5,444,000 barrels of distillates that were being produced daily during the week ending December 20th 2019...
With the increase in our gasoline production, our supplies of gasoline in storage at the end of the week rose for the 6th week in a row and for the 9th time in 19 weeks, increasing by 2,530,000 barrels to 213,768,000 barrels during the week ending December 16th, after our gasoline inventories had increased by 4,496,000 barrels during the prior week. Our gasoline supplies rose by less this week because the amount of gasoline supplied to US users rose by 459,000 barrels per day to 8,714,000 barrels per day, while our exports of gasoline fell by 316,000 barrels per day to 887,000 barrels per day, and while our imports of gasoline fell by 239,000 barrels per day to 551,000 barrels per day. After 6 consecutive gasoline inventory increases, our gasoline supplies were 0.9% more than last December 17th's gasoline inventories of 224,118,000 barrels, but still about 2% below the five year average of our gasoline supplies for this time of the year…
With the decrease in our distillates production, our supplies of distillate fuels decreased for the 6th time in 20 weeks, and for the 27th time over the past year, falling by 242,000 barrels to 119,929,000 barrels during the week ending December 16th, after our distillates supplies had increased by 1,364,000 barrels during the prior week. Our distillates supplies also fell this week because the amount of distillates supplied to US markets, an indicator of our domestic demand, increased by 247,000 barrels per day to 4,015,000 barrels per day, and because our imports of distillates fell by 99,000 barrels per day to 188,000 barrels per day, while our exports of distillates fell by 173,000 barrels per day to 1,310,000 barrels per day... After fifty-two inventory withdrawals over the past eighty-six weeks, our distillate supplies at the end of the week were were still 3.4% below the 124,154,000 barrels of distillates that we had in storage on December 17th of 2021, and about 7% below the five year average of distillates inventories for this time of the year...
Meanwhile, after a big drop in our oil imports and a big drop in our “unaccounted for crude oil”, our commercial supplies of crude oil in storage fell for the 12th time in 19 weeks and for the 31st time in the past year, decreasing by 5,895,000 barrels over the week, from 424,129,000 barrels on December 9th to 418,234,000 barrels on December 16th, after our commercial crude supplies had increased by 10,231,000 barrels over the prior week. After this week's decrease, our commercial crude oil inventories slipped to around 7% below the most recent five-year average of crude oil supplies for this time of year, but were still around 24% more than the average of our crude oil stocks as of the third weekend of December over the 5 years at the beginning of the past decade, with the disparity between those comparisons arising because it wasn’t until early 2015 that our oil inventories first topped 400 million barrels. And after our commercial crude oil inventories had jumped to record highs during the Covid lockdowns of the Spring of 2020, and then jumped again after February 2021's winter storm Uri froze off US Gulf Coast refining, our commercial crude supplies as of this December 16th were 1.3% less than the 423,571,000 barrels of oil we had in commercial storage on December 17th of 2021, and 16.3% less than the 499,534,000 barrels of oil that we had in storage on December 18th of 2020, and 5.2% less than the 441,359,000 barrels of oil we had in commercial storage on December 20th of 2019…
Finally, with our inventories of crude oil and our supplies of all products made from oil near multi-year lows over the most recent months, we are also continuing to watch the total of all U.S. Stocks of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products, including those in the SPR....after the big crude decreases we've already noted for this week, the total of our oil and oil product inventories, including those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and those held by the oil industry, and thus including everything from gasoline and jet fuel to propane/propylene and residual fuel oil, fell by 15,203,000 barrels this week, from 1,613,439,000 barrels on December 9th to 1,598,236,000 barrels on December 16th, after our total inventories had increased by 9,231,000 barrels during the prior week. This week's decrease left our total petroleum liquids inventories down by 190,197,000 barrels over the first 50 weeks of this year, and at the lowest since June 11th, 2004, or at a new 18 1/2 year low..
This Week's Rig Count
The number of drilling rigs active in the US increased for the 12th time in the past 21 weeks with this week's report, which only covers the six days ending Thursday, December 22nd, due to the Christmas holiday....But even with 93 weekly increases over the past 117 weeks, active rigs are still 1.8% below the prepandemic rig count....Baker Hughes reported that the total count of rotary rigs drilling in the US increased by 3 rigs to 779 rigs over the past week, which was still 193 more rigs than the 586 rigs that were in use as of the December 23rd report of 2021, but was 1,150 fewer rigs than the shale era high of 1,929 drilling rigs that were deployed on November 21st of 2014, a week before OPEC began to flood the global market with oil in an attempt to put US shale out of business….
The number of rigs drilling for oil increased by 2 to 622 oil rigs during the past week, after the number of rigs targeting oil had decreased by 5 during the prior week, but there are still 142 more oil rigs active now than were running a year ago, even as they amount to just 38.7% of the shale era high of 1609 rigs that were drilling for oil on October 10th, 2014, and as they are still down 8.9% from the prepandemic oil rig count….at the same time, the number of drilling rigs targeting natural gas bearing formations increased by 1 to 155 natural gas rigs, which was also up by 49 natural gas rigs from the 106 natural gas rigs that were drilling during the same week a year ago, even as they were only 9.7% of the modern high of 1,606 rigs targeting natural gas that were deployed on September 7th, 2008….
Other than those rigs targeting oil and natural gas, Baker Hughes reports that two "miscellaneous" rigs continued drilling this week: one of those was a directional rig drilling to between 5,000 and 10,000 feet on the big island of Hawaii, while the other was a directional rig drilling to between 5,000 and 10,000 feet into a formation in Lake county California that Baker Hughes doesn't track....While we haven't seen any details on either of those wells, in the past we've identified various "miscellaneous" rig activity as being for exploration, for carbon dioxide storage, and for utility scale geothermal projects...a year ago, there were were no such "miscellaneous" rigs running...
The offshore rig count in the Gulf of Mexico was unchanged at 15 rigs this week, with 14 rigs still drilling in Louisiana's offshore waters, and only one rig still drilling for oil offshore from Texas....that Gulf rig count equals the 15 Gulf rigs running a year ago, when 13 of the Gulf rigs were drilling for oil offshore from Louisiana and two were deployed for oil offshore from Texas...since there are not any rigs drilling off our other coasts, the Gulf rig count equals the national offshore count..
In addition to rigs running offshore, there are still two water based rigs drilling through inland bodies of water this week; those include a directional rig drilling for oil at a depth greater than 15,000 feet in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana; and a directional rig drilling for oil to between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, inland in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana ...a year ago, there was just one such rig drilling on inland waters...
The count of active horizontal drilling rigs was up by 3 to 710 horizontal rigs this week, which was also 182 more rigs than the 528 horizontal rigs that were in use in the US on December 23rd of last year, but just 51.7% of the record 1,374 horizontal rigs that were drilling on November 21st of 2014....in addition, the vertical rig count was up by one to 27 vertical rigs this week, which was unchanged from the 27 vertical rigs that were operating during the same week a year ago…on the other hand, the directional rig count was down by one to 42 directional rigs this week, while those were still up by 11 from the 31 directional rigs that were in use on December 23rd of 2021….
The details on this week’s changes in drilling activity by state and by major shale basin are shown in our screenshot below of that part of the rig count summary pdf from Baker Hughes that gives us those changes…the first table below shows weekly and year over year rig count changes for the major oil & gas producing states, and the table below that shows the weekly and year over year rig count changes for the major US geological oil and gas basins…in both tables, the first column shows the active rig count as of December 22nd, the second column shows the change in the number of working rigs between last week’s count (December 16th) and this week’s (December 22nd ) count, the third column shows last week’s December 16th active rig count, the 4th column shows the change between the number of rigs running on Thursday and the number running on the Thursday before the same weekend of a year ago, and the 5th column shows the number of rigs that were drilling at the end of that reporting week a year ago, which in this week’s case was the 23rd of December, 2021...
checking the Rigs by State file at Baker Hughes for the changes in the Texas Permian, we find that there were 5 rigs added in Texas Oil District 8, which overlies the core Permian Delaware, and that there was another rig added in Texas Oil District 7C, which covers the southernmost counties in the Permian Midland....since the Texas Permian count was thus up by six while the national Permian basin count was only up by two, we can thus conclude that the four rigs that were pulled out of New Mexico had been drilling in the far western Permian Delaware, in the southwest corner of that state....elsewhere in Texas, there was also a rig added in Texas Oil District 6, but since the rig count in the Haynesville shale was unchanged and there was also no change in adjacent Louisiana, we have to figure that rig was targeting a basin not tracked by Baker Hughes...
in other states, the two rigs added in North Dakota were targeting the Bakken shale of the Williston basin, but the Williston rig count is only up by one because a Bakken rig was removed from Montana at the same time...meanwhile, the rig pulled out of Wyoming most likely came from the DJ Niobrara chalk, because the Colorado rig count was unchanged....the rigs added in the Granite Wash and the Mississippian shale were most likely in Oklahoma, since rigs in corresponding regions of Texas and Kansas were unchanged, and since the the Oklahoma rig count was also unchanged, that means that two rigs were pulled out of Oklahoma that had been drilling in a basin or basins not tracked by Baker Hughes, in addition to the rig pulled out of the Cana Woodford...finally, since the natural gas rig addition was also in a basin not tracked by Baker Hughes, we'd have to figure that was the rig added in Texas District 6...
DUC well report for November
Monday of last week saw the release of the EIA's Drilling Productivity Report for December, which included the EIA's November data on drilled but uncompleted (DUC) oil and gas wells in the 7 most productive shale regions (click tab 3)....after revisions that left October DUCs lower, that data showed an increase in uncompleted wells nationally for the first time in 29 months, as completions slowed while drilling of new wells increased in November, but remained well below average pre-pandemic levels...for the 7 sedimentary regions covered by this report, the total count of DUC wells increased by 22 wells, rising from a revised 4,421 DUC wells in October to 4,443 DUC wells in November, which was still 13.9% fewer DUCs than the 5,163 wells that had been drilled but remained uncompleted as of the end of November of a year ago...this month's DUC increase occurred as 1005 wells were drilled in the 7 regions that this report covers (representing 87% of all U.S. onshore drilling operations) during November, up by 22 from the revised 983 wells that were drilled in October, while 983 wells were completed and brought into production by fracking them, down by 7 from the 990 well completions seen in October, but up by 193 from the 790 completions seen in November of last year....at the November completion rate, the 4,443 drilled but uncompleted wells remaining at the end of the month represents a 4.5 month backlog of wells that have been drilled but are not yet fracked, matching the 4.5 month DUC well backlog of a month ago, and just above the 7 1/2 year low of 4.4 months, despite a completion rate that is still nearly 14% below 2019's pre-pandemic average...
Both oil producing DUCS and natural gas DUCs rose during November, even as only two basins saw DUCs increase....the number of uncompleted wells remaining in the Permian basin of west Texas and New Mexico decreased by 8, from 1,051 DUC wells at the end of October to 1,043 DUCs at the end of November, as 427 new wells were drilled into the Permian basin during November, while 435 already drilled wells in the region were being fracked...at the same time, the number of uncompleted wells remaining in Oklahoma's Anadarko basin decreased by 3, falling from 710 at the end of October to 707 DUC wells at the end of November, as 72 wells were drilled into the Anadarko basin during November, while 75 Anadarko wells were completed....in addition, DUCs in the Eagle Ford shale of south Texas also decreased by 3, from 561 DUC wells at the end of October to 558 DUCs at the end of November, as 109 wells were drilled in the Eagle Ford during November, while 112 already drilled Eagle Ford wells were fracked....meanwhile, DUC wells in the Bakken of North Dakota were down by 2 to 499 at the end of October, as 79 wells were drilled into the Bakken during November, while 81 of the drilled wells in the Bakken were being fracked....on the other hand, DUC wells in the Niobrara chalk of the Rockies' front range increased by 31, rising from 443 at the end of October to 474 DUC wells at the end of November, as 143 wells were drilled into the Niobrara chalk during November, while 112 Niobrara wells were completed....
among the natural gas producing regions, the drilled but uncompleted well count in the Appalachian region, which includes the Utica shale, decreased by 3 wells, from 597 DUCs at the end of October to 594 DUCs at the end of November, as 100 new wells were drilled into the Marcellus and Utica shales during the month, while 103 of the already drilled wells in the region were fracked....on the other hand, the uncompleted well inventory in the natural gas producing Haynesville shale of the northern Louisiana-Texas border region rose by 10, from 558 DUCs in October to 568 DUCs by the end of November, as 75 wells were drilled into the Haynesville during November, while 65 of the already drilled Haynesville wells were fracked during the same period....thus, for the month of November, DUCs in the five major oil-producing basins tracked by this report (ie., the Anadarko, Bakken, Niobrara, Permian, and Eagle Ford) increased by fifteen to 3,281 wells, while the uncompleted well count in the major natural gas basins (the Marcellus, the Utica, and the Haynesville) was up by seven to 1,162 DUC wells, although as this report notes, once into production, more than half the wells drilled nationally will produce both oil and gas...
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Note: there’s more here..
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