Formation-Level Production Analytics: Reading Basin Trends Before They're Obvious

The Permian Basin gets more coverage than any other US onshore play. Investors know the headline numbers. Operators follow the operator news. Analysts track rig counts.

And yet the most useful signal — what is actually happening at the formation level, beneath the basin-wide noise — is rarely the thing being reported.

The Wolfcamp A and Wolfcamp B are not the same play. The Niobrara and the Codell within the DJ Basin have different production profiles, different dominant operators, and different trajectories. Basin-level numbers blend these together in a way that can obscure the trends that matter most for any specific decision.

WellStrata’s Formations Analytics module is built to work at the formation level.

What the module shows

Select a state and a formation, and the module loads four charts simultaneously:

1. Monthly production history

A stacked area chart of monthly oil, gas, and water production for the selected formation — the full history from first reportable activity to present. Oil is plotted in green, gas in red, water in blue, with toggleable series buttons so you can isolate any individual stream.

This is the most direct view of where production actually stands. The shape of the oil curve tells you whether the formation is in early development, plateau, or natural decline. A flattening curve alongside increasing well count is a sign of economic treadmill dynamics — new wells being drilled just to offset base decline. A rising curve from a flat well count indicates improving per-well performance, which usually points to better completion designs.

2. Wells drilled per year

A bar chart of annual well counts, formation-color-coded. This is the activity signal.

Activity follows economics: drilling picks up when prices support it, drops when they don’t. But the interesting deviations are when activity diverges from price — operators drilling through a downturn to hold acreage, or backing off despite high prices because of infrastructure constraints. Wells drilled per year gives you the raw activity signal; interpreting it requires context from price history and operator news.

The chart also makes vintage clear at a glance. If you’re building type curves, it tells you which years have enough well count to support statistically stable P50 estimates.

3. Top operators by cumulative oil

A horizontal bar chart of operators ranked by total cumulative oil in the selected formation, with Mbbl values labeled at bar ends.

This shows you who has the most production history in the formation — not necessarily who is performing the best, but who has been the most active and accumulated the most recoveries. It’s a useful starting point for identifying whose completion practices are worth benchmarking, because they have enough well count to generate statistically meaningful averages.

4. Average IP30 trend over time with regression

This is the most analytically valuable chart in the module: average IP30 by year, plotted as a line, with a linear regression trend line overlaid as a dashed line.

If the trend line is pointing up, per-well performance is improving — completion designs are getting better, operators are landing in better zones, or the learnings from early wells are compounding. If it’s flat or declining, the easy inventory may be depleted and operators are moving to lower-quality rock, or spacing has tightened to the point where parent-child interference is showing up in the averages.

The regression line cuts through vintage-to-vintage noise to show you the underlying directional signal. A formation where average IP30 has improved steadily from 400 bbl/d in 2015 to 750 bbl/d in 2024 is a very different investment thesis than one that peaked in 2019 and has been declining since.

Summary cards

Above the charts, four summary cards provide the formation’s current state at a glance:

Total wells — the count of all wells in the database for this formation
Active wells — wells that have reported production in the last 90 days
Total cumulative oil — the Mbbl recovered from this formation across all time
Average IP30 — the formation-wide average initial production rate

The gap between total wells and active wells is a rough signal of how much of the inventory has reached economic limit. A formation with 8,000 total wells and 3,000 active is either mature enough that early vintage wells have depleted, or it has gone through a period where wells were shut-in and not all came back.

How to use this in practice

The most common workflow is using Formations Analytics before going into Benchmarking. The formations view tells you whether per-well performance is improving or declining at the play level; benchmarking then tells you which operators are capturing the trend and which are lagging.

It’s also a useful sanity check on type curve assumptions. If you’re building a P50 EUR estimate for a proposed location and your assumption implies a steeper IP30 than the formation average has ever achieved, the formations view will surface that immediately.

Formations Analytics is available on all WellStrata plans. The default state at login is Colorado / Niobrara. The 14-day trial includes full access — no credit card required.