Characterizing Shale Gas and Tight Oil Drilling and Production Performance Variability

Shale gas and tight oil are energy resources of growing importance to the U.S. and the world. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has enabled economically fea-sible production from these resources, leading to a surge in domestic oil and gas production. This is providing an economic boon and reducing reliance on foreign sources of energy in the U.S., but there are still a number of environmental, economic, and technical challenges that must be overcome to unlock the resource's full potential. One key challenge is understanding variability in individual well performance-in terms of both drilling time (a key driver of well cost) and well productivity-which has led to greater than anticipated economic risk associated with shale gas and tight oil development. Thus far, more reliable forecasting has remained elusive due to its prohibitive cost and the poorly understood nature of the resource. There is an opportunity to make use of available drilling and production data to improve the characterization of variability. For my analysis, I use publicly-available well production data and drilling reports from a development campaign. In order to characterize variability, I use a combination of graphical, statistical, and dat