Charting Horizontal Wells' Production Impact

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

How has horizontal drilling changed Pennsylvania’s energy landscape? New graphics from the federal Energy Information Administration provide a clear answer.
Drillers have been extracting natural gas from below Pennsylvania for decades. But  in 2007, a major change started taking place: instead of drilling wells straight into the ground, energy extractors began drilling horizontally. That’s because  they were running their bits through the narrow – but gas-packed – Marcellus Shale formation.
Just a small sliver of the new wells drilled in Pennsylvania were horizontal in 2007. That percentage gradually expanded: by 2010, more than half of new wells were drilling sideways, and by 2011, horizontal wells made up more than three quarters of new sites:

Horizontal wells produce much more gas than their vertical counterparts. The following chart shows Pennsylvania’s daily

 
gas production has skyrocketed to nearly 3,500 million cubic feet a day.The number of new wells, shown above, has stayed relatively steady, at 2,000 to 2,500 a year. But as horizontal wells replace vertical wells, more and more gas is being extracted.

The EIA even put together a time-lapse video showing how horizontal wells have come to dominate Pennsylvania’s energy landscape. Watch how more and more horizontal wells start popping up, beginning in early 2008.

 

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