Kansas Drilled the Wells. It Never Finished Them.
Kansas produced 25,398,168 barrels in 2025 from 47,494 producing oil wells — an average of 1.46 barrels a day, with 61% of wells below one barrel a day. This paper argues the constraint is completion practice and capital allocation, not resource: the state produces from eighteen stratigraphic zones, a single locality can host twelve pay zones, yet about half of producing fields are developed as single-pay fields. It makes the case for acquiring existing cased wellbores and recompleting stacked pay instead of drilling new locations.
Key findings
Net wellhead revenue behind casing
Barrels recoverable, base case
State and local tax forgone by 2035
Methodology
The paper benchmarks a base-case plug-back-and-perforate recompletion against a new 3,500–4,500 foot infill well at $88 per barrel wellhead and 80% net revenue interest, then scales the result statewide under a scenario where 15% of producing wells carry an untested or under-drained zone worth 10,000 incremental barrels. Public revenue is modeled at the combined ~8% state and local rate against the 4.24% annual decline recorded since 2023, including the seven-year severance tax waiver for qualifying production enhancement projects.
What the scenarios show
| Exposure case | Share modeled | Annualized exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Recompletion capital intensity | Base case | ~$5,700 per incremental bbl/d |
| New infill well | Comparison | $15,000–$17,600 per incremental bbl/d |
| Break-even rate | Base case | ~4 bbl/d — top 6% of Kansas wells |
Kansas waives severance tax for seven years on incremental production from a qualifying production enhancement project, and names recompletion to a different zone in the same wellbore as qualifying. A new well is taxed from its first barrel.
Data sources
- —University of Kansas, Institute for Policy and Social Research — Kansas Statistical Abstract, energy and minerals tables
- —U.S. EIA, Distribution of U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Wells by Production Rate, 2025 report
- —Kansas Geological Survey — Subsurface Geology Series 9, Open-File Report 99-22, Oil and Gas Investigations 16
- —Kansas Department of Revenue — Minerals Severance Tax (MT-6)
- —Kansas Corporation Commission — Abandoned Well Plugging Update and rules for oil and gas conservation
- —U.S. Department of Energy / NETL reservoir class field demonstration reporting