Civil servants don’t get enough credit and more than their share of blame, especially when they make a mistake or get dragged into a political controversy.

And, as we’ve seen time and again, government isn’t necessarily any better at avoiding snafus than the private sector; in any case its screw-ups tend to be costlier and more noticeable.

But a lot of the best work the government does is truly excellent, whether exploring space or conducting cutting-edge medical research. This category also includes much of the work carried out by the US Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy.

The EIA gets some justified grief for timid forecasts, but its analysis of recent US energy trends rivals any from the private sector, for the unbeatable price of free (it’s on the taxpayers.)  And it just got even better thanks to the new monthly Drilling Productivity Report (pdf), offering a wealth of up-to-date statistics and projections for six key tight oil and shale gas region.

The basins covered are the Bakken, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Marcellus, Niobrara and Permian, so all the big ones driving the current surge in domestic oil and gas output. For each basin, the EIA’s new report combines state and industry data into a whole allowing readers track each play’s development, depletion and profitability on a monthly basis.

The numbers reported by industry to the states are used to estimate production from new wells as well as those drilled previously. The report also uses rig counts to chart the daily oil and gas production from new wells per rig, a rough measure of profitability since costly rigs are among the main reasons well drilling costs run in the millions.

The combined data shows how production from each basin – as well as its profitability – are trending month-to month.

For instance, we can see from the summary charts included with this issue’s first story how the Marcellus has become far and away the most important domestic natural gas resource over the last year.

They also show that Eagle Ford’s crude output has surpassed that of the Bakken this year. (Though this won’t come as a surprise to readers who’ve invested in EOG Resources (NYSE: EOG) and Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK) on our recommendation.)


Source: US Energy Information Administration

But the EIA is also able to estimate that the Marcellus wells drilled this month will boost the basin’s natural gas output by 579 million cubic feet per day  (MMcf/d), while older wells should subtract 171 MMcf/d, for a net gain of 408 MMcf/d,  or 3.3 percent of total output, in November. That’s a 43 percent annualized growth rate.

Moreover, these production gains are coming from just 100 rigs, down from the 140 or so deployed in the Marcellus at the outset of 2012, before gas prices collapsed. Which means that new well gas production per rig will have roughly doubled over that span to nearly 6 MMcf/d.

Making cross-basin comparisons, we can see from the report that the 270 or so Eagle Ford rigs are averaging 400 barrels a day of crude and 1 MMcf/d of natural gas from new wells per rig, vs. 79 barrels and 175 thousand cubic feet (mcf/d) a day for the Permian, an important basin but an older one that’s clearly less lucrative.

This is fresh, big-picture data that should prove invaluable in the months and years ahead for the trends it depicts over time, even as the monthly estimates fluctuate.

We hope the EIA will soon include the Utica and other emerging plays in this array. In any case, the Drilling Productivity Report and the civil servants who author it are quite the bargain.