Dean has provided his monthly update for Texas Oil and Natural Gas. The most recent month’s estimate is often volatile and may be ignored, the June and May estimates are likely pretty good (within 1% and 2%), the April 2016 estimate is likely to be robust(within 1% of the final value). The June EIA estimate is 240 kb/d lower than Dean’s estimate (about 7% too low). The numbers above the lines are for Dean’s estimate and the numbers below the lines are the EIA estimates for each month.

The change in the correction factors over time is shown in the chart above in kb/d, this amount is added to the RRC estimate to get the “corrected” output given by Dean’s estimate. The average is the April 2014 to July 2016 average shown by the dotted lines (T and T-1 only). T is the most recent month reported, T-1 is the month before month T, etc.

The chart above shows how Dean’s estimates have changed over time, wth estimates from Jan 2015 to July 2016. I have dropped the final 3 data points from each of the estimates, except for July 2016 where only the final month (July 2016) was dropped. Most months there was a tendency to underestimate output (except for the final 3 months of the estimate which is not shown in most cases). March 2016 was a notable exception, but even in that month’s estimate output was only too high by 0.6% relative to the July estimate after the most recent 3 months are dropped. By contrast the Nov 2015 estimate was 1.6% too low. The final 2 points of the July 2016 estimate in the chart above might be high or low by a few percent, but the April 2016 data point of 3434 kb/d for TX C+C output is likely to be within 1% of the final value.

Lots of people like to see this chart, it doesn’t really tell me much except that there is a tendency for the RRC to under report output due to incomplete data collection. It takes about 18 months for the RRC reported data to be within 1% of the final value (when all the data is in and finalized). It is not clear why the NDIC is able to compile their data so much more quickly, it may be the fact that they only produce one third or less of the oil and natural gas produced in Texas. In any case, due to Dean’s fantastic work, we have pretty good estimates through at least April 2016.

The chart above is an estimate of Texas Natural Gas output in millions of cubic feet per day. The last 3 data points might be relatively volatile for the corrected estimate but the April 2016 “corrected” estimate is likely to be robust. In April 2016 the TX natural gas output was 23,916 million cubic feet per day, the EIA estimate for that month is 22,697 MMCF/D (gross output).

There was a problem with the February 2016 Gas Well gas reported by the RRC this month compared with last month. To correct this, I took the average of the difference between last month’s RRC data and this month’s data for Jan 2016 and March 2016 and used that for the Feb 2016 estimate (the average difference was added to last month’s Feb 2016 estimate.) Then Dean’s usual method was applied to get the estimate in the chart above.