Blog
The well record, examined
Field notes on production data, decline analysis, and putting AI to work on oil & gas — from the team building Wellsite.
Covering the Competition: Standing Alerts on a Rival's Permits, Wells, and Output
Most competitive intelligence is stale by the time it reaches a deck. A standing set of alerts on a rival operator's permits, production, and declines turns the record into a live feed you can act on.
Read more →Room to Run: Reading a County's Drilling Density Before You Buy In
Before you underwrite acreage in a county, the first question isn't how good the wells are — it's how much of the good rock is already drilled up. The record answers that.
Read more →The Handoff: What a Well Does After It Changes Operators
When a well's operator changes, the record keeps counting barrels through the transition. That production signature tells you whether the buyer added value or just harvested the decline.
Read more →Reading the Permit Cadence: Is This Operator Gearing Up or Winding Down?
Production tells you what an operator did last year. Permit filings tell you what they're about to do. Here's how to read the cadence as a leading indicator.
Read more →The Slow Build: When a Well Ramps Up Instead of Flushing Off
Most horizontals flush hard in month one, then decline. When a well climbs for six months instead, someone is managing the choke — and it changes how you read the type curve.
Read more →Consistency Counts: Does This Operator Drill Reliable Wells or Roll the Dice?
A high average well can hide a wide spread of results. Here's how to read an operator's distribution of well outcomes — not just the mean — before you underwrite the next batch.
Read more →The Stripper Line: Finding the Wells About to Fall Below Their Economic Limit
Every producing well eventually crosses the line where the barrels no longer cover the pumper, the power bill, and the water hauling. Here's how to find the wells in your book that are about to get there.
Read more →Treadmill or Growth? Splitting an Operator's Rise Into Base Decline and New Wells
An operator's county production is up 18% year over year. Before you call it growth, ask how much of that came from new wells outrunning the base decline.
Read more →Follow the Barrels: Mapping an Operator's Production Across Counties
An operator with 400 wells spread across five counties looks diversified on a map. The record usually shows the barrels are far more concentrated than the footprint suggests.
Read more →Minding the Minerals: Watching the Wells Behind Your Royalty Check
Mineral and non-op interests generate cash without a field office to tell you what's happening. Here's how to track new permits and fading production on acreage you don't operate — before the check tells you.
Read more →The Permit That Never Got Drilled: Screening for Stale Inventory
A drilling permit is a statement of intent, not a well. Here's how to find the permits in a county that were filed and then quietly let sit — and what that tells you about an operator's real plans.
Read more →Barrels Per Foot: Comparing Wells When the Laterals Don't Match
A 12,000-foot lateral will almost always out-produce a 7,500-foot one — but that doesn't make it a better well. Normalizing production by lateral length is the only way to compare completions on equal footing.
Read more →Counting the Backlog: Finding an Operator's DUC Inventory in the Record
Drilled-but-uncompleted wells are near-term production sitting on the shelf. Here's how to count an operator's DUC backlog from permits, wellbores, and the absence of first oil.
Read more →Boe Isn't Barrels: The 6:1 Trap in Your Well Screen
Rank a county's top wells by boe and the gas-heavy ones float to the top — carried there by an accounting ratio, not by value. Here's how to screen so the list means what you think it means.
Read more →The Tail You're Banking On: Does the Record Support Your Terminal Decline?
Late-life decline assumptions quietly drive a big share of PDP value. Here's how to check your terminal-decline number against how mature wells in the same county actually behave.
Read more →Percent of the Prize: How Much of a Well's Oil Is Already Out of the Ground?
A well's remaining value isn't its rate today — it's the barrels still underground. Here's how to read cumulative recovery against an estimated ultimate to see whether a well is half-empty or mostly spent.
Read more →Spacing Test: Did Downspacing Cost You Barrels?
As operators pack more wells into a section, per-well production often slips. Here's how to check whether tighter spacing helped total recovery or just split the same barrels.
Read more →Watering Out: What Rising Water Cut Tells You Before the Pump Quits
A well rarely dies from a lack of oil — it drowns. Tracking water cut against oil rate turns a vague sense of decline into a clear read on lift economics and remaining life.
Read more →Held by Production, or Barely? Checking a Lease's HBP Pulse
Before you pay for acreage, you need to know whether the wells holding it are still producing enough to matter. Here's how to check a lease's HBP pulse against the record.
Read more →Flash vs. Cash: Why Ranking Wells by IP Misleads Buyers
A monster first month tells you how hard a well was flowed, not how much it will ultimately make. Ranking by cumulative production tells a very different story — and Wellsite can show you both.
Read more →Underwriting the Package: Rolling 40 Wells Into One Decline Curve
A divestiture rarely comes one well at a time. Here's how to aggregate a whole package into a single production and decline picture — and spot the few wells doing all the work.
Read more →Trust but Verify: Vetting a Seller's Production Numbers Against the Record
A seller's data room shows clean curves and a tidy PDP forecast. Before you underwrite it, check every well against the independent record — and find the gaps the deck won't mention.
Read more →The First 90 Days: Reading Early Production Before the Decline Sets In
A well's first three months of production is the earliest hard signal you get. Here's how to benchmark IP30 and IP90 against the county and offsets to spot outperformers before the decline curve tells the story.
Read more →The Well That Went Quiet: Finding Idle Wells Worth Reactivating
A well that stopped producing isn't always a dead well. Some shut in with plenty of oil left. Here's how to separate the depleted from the merely idle across a county or an acquisition target.
Read more →Did the Workover Pay Off? Measuring the Uplift After an Intervention
A well got a workover last quarter. The real question isn't whether production went up for a month — it's whether the uplift beat the decline you'd have gotten anyway, and whether it's holding.
Read more →Operator vs. Operator: Who Actually Drills the Better Well in This County?
Two operators working the same rock rarely get the same barrels. Here's how to settle the question by pulling both books, normalizing the wells, and comparing what each one actually produces.
Read more →Concentration Risk: How Much of the Book Rides on the Top 10 Wells?
A producing book with 60% of its output coming from a handful of wells behaves very differently than one spread evenly. Here's how to measure top-well concentration from the record before you underwrite it.
Read more →Sizing Up a Location Before You Bid: The Instant Offset Report
Before you put money on acreage, you need to know what the rock around it actually produces. Here's how to build an offset report on any location in a single conversation.
Read more →Decline or Downtime? Telling a Fading Well From a Choked One
A well making fewer barrels isn't always a reservoir problem. Here's how to separate real decline from lost production days hiding in the monthly record — and find the barrels you're leaving in the tank.
Read more →Which Old Wells Are Worth a Refrac? Screening the Book for Second-Life Candidates
Refracs live or die on candidate selection. Here's how to sift a mature operator's book for the wells that have declined hard but still sit next to strong offsets.
Read more →Freeze-Offs and Winter Dips: What a Cold-Weather Production Drop Actually Costs
A hard freeze can knock a well's monthly volumes down without touching the reservoir. Here's how to separate a weather-driven dip from a real decline — and whether the barrels came back.
Read more →Did the Offset Frac Hit My Well? Reading the Production Signature of Interference
When a neighbor completes a new well nearby, your producers can spike, stall, or lose pressure for good. Here's how to read that signature in the production record and tie it back to the offset that caused it.
Read more →Rising GOR: What a Well's Gas-Oil Ratio Says About Its Reservoir
A climbing gas-oil ratio is one of the earliest signals that a well's drive mechanism is changing. Here's how to pull GOR from the production record and read what it's telling you.
Read more →Are the Wells Getting Better? Reading a County by Vintage
Completion designs change year over year. Grouping a county's wells into drill-year cohorts tells you whether newer wells actually outproduce the ones that came before — and by how much.
Read more →Building a Type Curve From the Record: What Does an Average Well Here Actually Do?
Before you underwrite a drilling program or a deal, you need a type curve. Here's how to build one straight from the production record instead of starting from a blank reservoir model.
Read more →From Permit to First Oil: How Long Does an Operator Take to Convert?
The gap between a permit filing and first production tells you how fast an operator actually executes. Here's how to measure that cycle time across a book and what the number reveals.
Read more →Screening a County for Its Best Wells: From Thousands of Wellbores to a Shortlist of 10
A geologist wants the ten strongest recent wells in a county to reverse-engineer what's working. Here's how a plain-language screen turns the full record into a ranked shortlist in one pass.
Read more →Finding the Up-and-Comer: Which Operators Are Ramping in a County
Declining books get all the attention, but the more valuable signal is often the operator quietly adding barrels. Here's how to surface who's actually growing in a county before it's obvious.
Read more →Finding the Motivated Seller: Which Operators' County Books Are Rolling Over
An acquisition team doesn't want the operator with the best wells — it wants the one whose production is fading faster than they can afford. Here's how to screen a county's operators for the book most likely to come up for sale.
Read more →Ranking Your Leases: Which Acreage Is Actually Carrying the Book
Most operators can name their best-producing lease from memory. Ranking every lease by current rate, cumulative, and trend at once is a different exercise — and it usually surprises people.
Read more →Reading the Decline: How Fast Is This Well Fading, and What's Left?
Before you underwrite a producing well, you need its decline rate and a sense of remaining life. Here's how to pull that from the record in plain language.
Read more →Catching the Anomaly: Flagging Wells That Break From Their Own Trend
A well that suddenly falls off its own decline curve is trying to tell you something. Here's how to ask the Wellsite data lake which wells in your book are behaving abnormally this month — and separate real problems from noise.
Read more →Who's Drilling Next Door? Turning Permit Filings Into Early Warning
A new permit within a few miles of your acreage is a signal—about offset drainage, competitor intent, and where value is moving. Here's how to ask the Wellsite data lake to surface those filings before the rig shows up.
Read more →Spotting Underperformers: Benchmarking a Well Against Its Offsets
An operator's most useful question isn't "how much did this well make?" — it's "how much should it have made?" Here's how offset benchmarking answers that in plain language.
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