Tabulated Stripper Well Data for the San Juan Basin

It took me about a month, but this website now displays all the stripper (also known as marginal wells) in both the Colorado and New Mexico portion of the San Juan Basin (SJB). This post details on how and why I decided to gather this information.

As part of their bankruptcy proceedings with the Texas Railroad Commission, Weatherly Oil and Gas agreed to a 3.5-million-dollar settlement to cover the estimate 13.5 million dollars it is going to cost to plug and abandon (P and A in oil patch parlance) 173 now abandoned wells. The state of Texas will cover most of the bill, but what I find maddening is that the year before declaring bankruptcy Weatherly Oil and Gas executives paid themselves $8 million in bonuses. You can read more about the Weatherly Oil and Gas debacle (link here).

What does this have to do with the SJB? The Weatherly news got me thinking about the SJB as Gas Production declines (8.5% in 2020 by my calculations) and how many wells are close to the end of their production life.

Fortunately, the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division’s (NMOCD) website makes available excel files for download that lists the oil and gas wells categorized as “stripper wells”. The files cover the years 2019 and 2020 and are further broken down into files for oil stripper wells and gas stripper wells.

The SJB is primarily a natural gas producer so I made the decision to focus on “Gas Stripper” wells. The NMOCD file was large with the three County’s making up the NM portion of the SJB having over 10,000 wells defined as stripper wells.

The first thing to understand is what exactly constitutes a NM stripper well.

NMOCD defines a gas well as a stripper well as any well that produces on average less than 60 MCF of gas a day. They calculate MCF/day by dividing cumulative yearly production by producing days. For example, a well that produces 5000 MCF in a year and has 200 Producing days would be categorized as a 25 MCF/day well and hence would be considered a stripper well by the NMOCD.

All the wells in the stripper file produced between 1 and ~20,000 MCF per year. That is a large range and I thought it illuminative to graph up the NM stripper wells by yearly production dividing the 1 -20,000 range into 10, 2000MCF intervals. The graphs on the Stripper Well Page show how the 10,233 NM SJB stripper wells breakdown.

The breakdown skews towards the lower production. The largest interval is the 1 – 2,000MCF/year interval with 1,431 wells, and far more than half of the NM stripper wells are in the 1 – 10,000 MCF/ year range than in the 10,000 – 20,000 MCF/year range. If you look at cumulative production per interval, the 1,431 wells in the 1 – 2,000MCF range produce a cumulative 1,164,946 MCP of gas, which is less than 2% of stripper well production. Overall, stripper wells production is 16% of NM SJB gas production.

The next obvious question is to put 10,233 NM SJB stripper wills into context to all active wells in the SJB (NM and CO) so I tabulated all the active wells in the 5 counties that make up the SJB (La Plata and Archuleta Counties in Colorado, San Juan, Rio Arriba and Sandoval Counties in New Mexico) and came up with a final number of 24,656 active wells.

The final step was to count the stripper wells in the Colorado Counties of the SJB (la Plata and Archuleta). This was considerably harder than in NM because I could not find any tabulation of stripper wells in the COGCC website, even though the COGCC website is considerably more modern and usable than the NMOCD website.

I had to count the CO stripper wells myself. I will not go into the gory details, but I did want to mention in this blog one assumption that I had to make counting CO stripper wells. Unlike the NMOCD, the COGCC does not list wells producing less than 60 MCF per day. Moreover, on their website while they do make searchable and downloadable lots of the data, well producing days is not one of the search criteria available. Since the NMOCD defines a stripper well as any well that produces less than 60 MCF per day and the use producing days to calculate that value, I would need to come up with another definition that works for CO stripper wells and is comparable with NM stripper wells.

I decided to use the criteria of any well in the SJB of CO that produced less than 20,000MCF for the year. I did this by looking at the NM data and seeing that virtually all the NM stripper wells produced less than 20,000 MCF annually. Though the comparison between CO and NM stripper wells in not exact, it is close.

In any case, CO had far fewer stripper wells than NM. I calculated 572 wells that produce less than 20,000 MCF annually out of a total 3,331 active wells in the CO portion of the San Juan Basin. Cumulative gas production out of these 572 wells is only 2% on CO SJB gas production. The breakdown is also more equitable when you look at 2000MCF intervals starting at the low end of 1 -2000MCF annual production climbing to the high end of 18,000 – 20,000 MCF annual production. In general, the CO gas wells are younger and thus produce more gas than the wells in the southern NM many of which are over 50 years old.