Why is my well's remaining value blank?

Because we would rather show nothing than a number we do not trust. There are four reasons a value is blank: no usable decline fit, the well is flat or rising rather than declining, the trend is too noisy to project (r-squared below 0.30), or the well is already producing at or below the economic limit we use. The last one is the most common on long-lived stripper wells and is an economics call, not missing data.

What is the economic limit you use?

About 10 Mcf per day for gas-primary wells (300 Mcf per month) and about 1 barrel per day for oil-primary wells (30 bbl per month). Below that we do not put a dollar value on future production, though the well may keep producing for years.

Methodology · 663,998 scored wells

How we score a well — and when we leave it blank.

Q: How is the decline curve calculated?

We fit an exponential decline to the last 24 producing months after the well's peak, using least squares on the log of monthly volume for whichever stream (oil or gas) dominates the well's cumulative production. The annual decline rate and an r-squared goodness-of-fit are published on every well card.

Every well card here is computed from the state's own filings, with the same code, in public. This page is the part most data vendors don't publish: what we compute, where it breaks, and the exact number of wells where we decline to print a value.

The short version

We carry 663,998 health-scored wells. 473,427 get a fitted decline curve and a 12-month projection. 129,290 get a full dollar valuation. The other 534,708 show a decline or a rate but no remaining-value figure — not because the data is missing, but because a number there would be one we couldn't stand behind.

What we compute

For each well or lease with public production history we fit an exponential decline to the last 24 producing months after the well's peak — least squares on the log of monthly volume, for whichever stream (oil or gas) dominates the well's cumulative production. From that fit:

Decline % / yr — how fast output is falling. A negative number means the well is growing, and the card relabels it accordingly.
Deferred production ($/mo) — the gap between what the trend predicts and what the well actually reported, priced out. Capped at half of recent output so noise can't invent it.
Liquid-loading risk — inferred from the shape of the curve. Public data has no downhole pressure, so treat MED/HIGH as "worth a look", not a diagnosis.
Remaining value — the decline integrated forward to an economic limit, at flat prices. Indicative, not a reserves report.

The two gates — and why they exist

An r² floor of 0.30. We publish a decline percentage for any in-bounds fit, but deferred production and remaining value require the fit to clear r² ≥ 0.30. That threshold isn't arbitrary: above it, the fitted curve beats simply carrying the last rate forward on 62–74% of wells (tested at 6, 12 and 18 months out); below it, roughly a coin flip. Of the 473,427 wells with a decline curve, 243,165 clear the floor.

An economic limit. Roughly 10 Mcf/d for gas-primary wells (300 Mcf/mo) and 1 bbl/d for oil-primary (30 bbl/mo). Below that we won't put a dollar value on future production. This is the single biggest reason a long-lived stripper well shows a blank — and it is an economics call, not a gap in the data.

The four reasons a value is blank

These are exhaustive, mutually exclusive, and sum exactly to the 534,708 blanks:

Reason	Wells	What it means on the card
Too noisy to project	230,262	The well is declining, but the trend scatters below our r² 0.30 floor. The decline % is still shown, marked indicative only.
Already at the economic limit	113,875	The fit is good; the well simply produces less than the cut-off. Common on Appalachian strippers that have paid out for decades and will keep going.
No publishable fit	98,410	Just over half (51,775) did produce a trend — but one outside the range we publish, steeper than 98%/yr or rising faster than 25%/yr, which usually means a re-frac or a reporting artifact. The remaining 46,635 are still at or near peak, or have fewer than six reported producing months.
Not declining	92,161	Production is flat or rising across the fit window. Deferment and remaining value are decline-based, so they stay blank until the well rolls over.

Limits we'd rather state than hide

Texas is lease-grain. The RRC reports production by lease, not by wellbore, so a single Texas record can cover a whole unit. Where one record dominates a county total, our county pages now say so by name.
8.5% of published values are horizon-capped. We stop integrating at 30 years, so those figures read "30 years at the current trend", not a converged forecast.
Recent months are preliminary. State filings lag and usually revise upward; the chart marks the preliminary tail so you don't read it as a real decline.
Reporting cadence varies. Most states file monthly; Ohio is quarterly and Pennsylvania conventional and New York are annual. A coarser grain is smoother, which flatters the fit.
Flat prices, no differentials. Remaining value is indicative and ignores basis, opex, royalty burden and workovers. It is not a reserves report.

Check it against a well you know.

Every figure above is on the card, free and without signup — look up a well, browse by state and county, or see what we cover and how current it is.

Counts are from the current production database and move with each monthly rebuild. If you think a specific well is scored wrong, tell us — that feedback is how the gates above got calibrated.