BY BRENDAN GIBBONS
Times-Shamrock Writer

Once again, MarcellusGas.org is staying ahead of the production curve.

A small business run by Susquehanna County Web entrepreneur Carl Hagstrom, MarcellusGas.org has developed arguably the best natural gas production and royalty calculator available for the Marcellus Shale.

Users can input county, township, the size of their production unit, the number of acres they own, the percent of royalties they receive and the current price of gas.

What comes out is an estimate of how much the well will produce over how long, calculated as an average among all wells in a four-mile radius.

A production curve is a well’s output plotted over time. It holds crucial data for landowners who receive gas royalties for wells drilled on or under their land.

For the rest of us, the curve offers a hint at how long a well in a specific area might gush before it slows to a trickle.

“Nine out of 10 people are interested in the dollars, and the other one is interested in the decline,” Mr. Hagstrom said of his users.

For Marcellus wells, the curves look a bit like a boomerang. Production starts high, then drops off significantly within the first year, then levels out over time.

For example, a well in Dimock Twp., Susquehanna County, averages almost 169 million cubic feet in its first month.

Within a little over a year, that average production drops by half. Four years later, it’s an eighth of what it was the first year.

The prediction comes with some weak spots, Mr. Hagstrom acknowledges. The Marcellus is still young, so the further out a user extends a prediction, the fewer number of wells he or she can compare.

In Dimock, 148 producing wells are older than one month, but only 11 are older than six years.

It also doesn’t account for gas companies willingly holding back production on a well, as they might if they don’t have enough or pipeline capacity to get their product to market.

Despite these limitations, Mr. Hagstrom said he has heard from royalty owners who compared their statements to his calculator and found it accurate.

MarcellusGas.org’s wasn’t the first calculator available. Penn State Extension came out with its version earlier this year.

But MarcellusGas.org’s is cheaper — $20 per year for full site membership, compared to Penn State’s $19.99 per month for county-level data.

And while Penn State offers statewide data for free, MarcellusGas.org is the only to offer township-level data.

Reached by email, Jim Ladlee, Penn State Extension’s associate director of its Marcellus Center for Outreach & Research, didn’t seem to mind the competition.

“Hopefully the availability of more data will help the user make their own visual assessment about the scenarios they develop,” he said.

Staying ahead of the curve is how MarcellusGas.org got its start.

Since 2010, the same year the state Department of Environmental Protection began publishing twice-annual Marcellus gas production data separately, Mr. Hagstrom and his staff have gathered, organized and published the data on MarcellusGas.org.

As their database grew, they came up with various ways of organizing it. For instance, they could answer which gas companies own the top-producing wells per day, or who earned the most DEP violations.

“It’s one thing to have five billion pieces of information,” Mr. Hagstrom said. “It’s another to have it stored so you can access it in a meaningful way.”

Eventually, they realized they could use these data to make predictions about wells. Mr. Hagstrom credited documents manager Maria Hill, his son Brett Hagstrom, who works on document retrieval and site development, and programmer Jim Roberts of Lansdale-based Roberts WebForge for making the calculator a reality.

To help refine the tool, Mr. Hagstrom is asking royalty owners to contact him to compare their monthly royalty statements with his data. His email address is Systems@MarcellusGas.org.

“I would love to hear any input from people who have gotten some payments for a comparative view of what’s coming up on that calculator,” he said.

Such a predictor of potential income would be useful for estate planning or deciding whether to sign a lease, said Susquehanna County resident Trevor Walczak, vice president of Pennsylvania’s chapter of the National Association of Royalty Owners. He said he hasn’t used the calculator yet.

He also pointed out that the calculator is sure to improve thanks to a recently passed bill by Rep. Tina Pickett, R-110, Towanda, that requires gas companies to submit monthly production reports, rather than every six months.

That bill takes effect March 31.