You've got a location on the table — a lease trade, a bolt-on, a farm-in offer, or a section you're thinking about permitting. The first question is always the same: what do the wells around here actually do? Not the operator's pitch deck. Not a type curve someone drew two years ago. The real record.
That used to mean a day of pulling well files, matching API numbers, and stitching together production tables. You can now ask it as one question and get an offset report back while you're still on the call.
Start With What's Already Producing Nearby
The anchor of any location screen is the producing offsets. Drop a point — a surface location, a section, a lat/long — and ask what wells are within a mile or two and what they've done.
A useful first pass pulls, for each offset:
- cumulative oil and gas to date
- peak month and the month it occurred
- current rate and months on production
- the operator and the target formation, where the record carries it
That single table tells you more than any summary statistic. Ten offsets averaging 90 MBO cum is a very different asset if nine of them are dogs and one is a 400 MBO outlier than if they're all clustered around 90. Ask for the spread, not just the mean — the distribution is the risk.
Benchmark the Offsets Against the County
A raw cum number means nothing in isolation. The next move is context: how do these offsets stack up against the county as a whole?
Ask the platform to benchmark the offset group against the county average over the same producing window. You're looking for one answer — is this pocket of the county better, worse, or average? A location whose offsets consistently beat the county by 30% on 12-month cum is telling you the rock is good and someone already proved it. A location that trails the county average is a caution flag no acreage price should paper over.
This is also where vintage matters. If the only strong offsets were drilled with 2015-era completions and everything modern nearby is thinner, you're looking at a place that hasn't responded to bigger fracs — worth knowing before you underwrite a modern well design.
Read the Decline, Not Just the Cum
Cumulative production is a rear-view mirror. What you're buying is the future, and that lives in the decline behavior of the offsets.
Pull the decline rate on the best two or three offsets and look at how the curve is shaped. A well that peaked at 700 BOPD and is holding 150 BOPD three years later has a very different remaining-value profile than one that peaked at 900 and fell to 40. Steep, gassy declines and shallow, oily tails underwrite completely differently. Ask what each offset is producing now versus its peak, and how fast it faded to get there — that's your read on both EUR and the quality of the pressure support in the section.
Check Who Else Is Coming
Producing offsets tell you the past. Permits tell you the near future — and both directions matter.
Ask what drilling permits have been filed near the location. New permits from a neighboring operator can mean two things at once: confirmation that a credible operator likes the rock, and a warning that offset fracs may soon depressurize the very wells you're evaluating. Either way, you want it in the report. A section that's about to get boxed in by four new laterals is a different bid than empty acreage with room to develop.
It's also worth asking whether nearby permits ever convert. If an operator has been filing and letting permits lapse in the area, that stale inventory is a quieter signal that the location may not be as economic as the filings suggest.
Roll It Into a Lease View
If the deal is a lease or a package rather than a single location, extend the same logic up a level. Rank the leases in the package by production, and see which acreage is actually carrying the book versus riding along. A trade priced on the whole block can hide the fact that one lease does the work and the rest are filler — or the reverse, that there's an underdeveloped lease with strong offsets and no wells on it yet.
The Whole Thing Is One Conversation
None of this is exotic analysis. It's the offset report every evaluation engineer builds by hand — producing wells within a radius, benchmarked against the county, read for decline, cross-checked against permits and leases. The difference is that against the Wellsite data lake you ask for it in plain language and get it back in minutes, while the deal is still live.
Before you sign anything, ask the location one question: show me the offsets, how they compare to the county, how fast they're declining, and who's permitting nearby. The answer is usually the difference between a bid and a pass.