The Field Guide to North American DUCs
Thursday June 30, 2016
When Drillinginfo first started releasing counts of the Drilled but Uncompleted wells (DUCs) in the U.S., I immediately was questioned on how to interpret the results. Everyone had a different DUC well definition, depending on what they actually wanted to evaluate. So let me suggest some terminology to clarify what we are talking about…
DUC well: At Drillinginfo, we begin our analysis with the literal definition: a well that has been drilled and has not yet been completed.[1] As of June 23, we had approximately 6,100 DUC wells in the 14 states where we track DUC wells, excluding new wells drilled in the month of June, as shown in Figure 1.
The chart shows the DUC well count based on the month when the well was drilled, and the high number of American DUCs in recent months indicate normal inventory in the process of being completed.
While the total DUC count is useful to track activity levels and forecast potential production, examining DUCS by vintage refines the DUC count into relevant subsets. Let’s use the Eagle Ford as an example, where we have 586 total DUCs as of June 23, as shown in Figure 2.
Similar to Figure 1, this chart shows higher level of DUC wells in more recent months, reflecting what we’ll refer to as work-in-process inventory (WIP). This is the portion of DUC wells in the normal lag time where the drilling has finished but completion activity hasn’t yet begun, or where a completion might have been finished but the associated filings have not yet been published nor has production been reported. This “time lag” varies by state based on different regulatory requirements, but simply scanning the chart indicates a step-change in DUCs from December 2015 to present. If we make a general assumption that wells dri...