Productivity in the world’s busiest shale play is being inflated by more than 1,000 wells that were fracked but never reported, according to the former CEO of oilfield service giant Schlumberger Ltd.
About 21% of oil wells in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico that were fracked last year didn’t get reported to FracFocus, a voluntary, non-profit repository of fracking data, according to satellite imagery from data analytics company Kayrros.
“It means the actual production per well at the basin level is not as good as people think,” said Andrew Gould, the chairman of Kayrros’s advisory board ...