New Alberta NGL data reveals 78% of NuVista Montney liquids production is high value – BOE Intel

It’s a new age for NGL reporting in Alberta. Petro Ninja and BOE Intel were at the forefront of integrating this new data into our systems, and were some of the first to do so.

As data nerds, we are excited that the blind spot in liquids reporting in Alberta has finally been fixed, and that we no longer need to guess about liquids rich plays like the Montney and the Duvernay.

Let’s use this new data to take a look at NuVista’s Montney production. NuVista is a condensate rich producer with production that comes predominantly from the Montney. While the company’s results speak for themselves, following along at the well level in the public domain has often been tricky because NGL production in Alberta was not publicly reported until just a few days ago.

Using this new NGL data, we can get a production profile for these 470 Montney wells licensed to NuVista (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Gross production from 470 Montney wells licensed to NuVista (hover over chart to see details)

Looking at the new NGL data, we can observe the following about this group of NuVista Montney wells:

• 32% of the Montney production is weighted to higher value liquids (oil, condensate, pentane).
• 41% of the Montney production is liquids weighted.
• Another way to think about this is that ~78% of the liquids content is higher value liquids (oil, condensate, pentane).

These numbers would line up fairly closely with what NuVista would have reported last month when it announced record quarterly production for Q4 2023.

Figure 2 – Gross production from 470 Montney wells licensed to NuVista as of December 2023 – by commodity type

Illustrating just how big the gap was in public data reporting until last week, had you looked up condensate volumes for NuVista in the public domain you would have seen 136 bbl/d in December 2023. Now that we can see Pentane volumes included in Alberta reporting, the combined Pentane + Condensate gross volumes licensed to NuVista (essentially plant condensate + field condensate) amounts to 24,579 bbl/d (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – Gross licensed condensate production (including pentane) – NuVista