Based on production data verifiable to date, the Marcellus Shale will become the “King of the Gas Shales” by 2015 at the latest, U.S. energy analysts with Raymond James & Associates Inc. said in a new report.

J. Marshall Adkins and colleague John Freeman issued Raymond James’ 2Q2012 U.S. production survey on Tuesday. For more than a decade Raymond James has tracked publicly traded domestic natural gas exploration and production (E&P) output, which comprises about half of total U.S. production as a “fact check” on the Energy Information Administration (EIA) Form 914 data.

“It’s been awhile since we’ve heard any claims of hydraulic fracture-causing earthquakes (our guess is the media is focused on real news like the upcoming election), but we’re still monitoring the resulting natural gas tidal wave that has wreaked havoc on prices and the crude oil wave that seems to be building scary momentum,” they wrote.

“So we marked to market our rig count assumptions through August and decided to dive back into our production by play model. We also lumped our quarterly natural gas production survey into the mix as a fact check on Uncle Sam to make sure the macro-level numbers provided by the EIA match up with what we’re seeing on the ground (i.e., the actual producers).”

Onshore oil production remains “robust,” up about 800,000 b/d year/year (y/y) in 2Q2012. Although the Gulf of Mexico fell a bit, Raymond James is now forecasting full-year 2012 oil production of 6.394 million b/d (736,000 b/d of growth) and 2013 oil output of 7.246 million b/d (852,000 b/d of growth). The full-year forecasts for 2012 and 2013 “are down a modest 53,000 b/d and 29,000 b/d, respectively, from our prior forecast.”

The analysts said it was a “little too early” to complete 2Q2012 production data for three major U.S. oil plays: the Eagle Ford Shale, the Williston Basin and the Permian Basin. They track two areas in the Permian, broken out as the “Horizontal” and the “Other.” However, a comparison using 1Q2012 data indicated that the Raymond James projections match up “well” with reported output.

“We believe the market is still underestimating the ability of our exploration and production friends to produce that Texas tea.”

For natural gas, “the trend has gone from ‘grow, grow grow’ to ‘moderate, moderate moderate,'” the analysts wrote. “Considering that we’ve dropped over 440 gas rigs in less than a year, all we can say is that it’s about dang time.”

Even though the United States has dropped 440 natural gas rigs since last October, domestic output won’t decline “until 2015, thanks to the trifecta of uncompleted well inventories, associated gas production and efficiencies,” said the duo.

Raymond James still is projecting y/y gas growth of 4 Bcf/d, but the 2013 growth outlook was cut to 0.5 Bcf/d from a previous forecast of 2 Bcf/d. “Interestingly, we’re still projecting gas production growth through 2014, and although it’s very marginal growth, we believe that is a testament to both drilling efficiencies and the impact of associated gas from the oil plays.”

The Marcellus Shale is proving to be the world-class gas play that everyone has said it would be. Based on onshore gas output data verified to date, “the numbers have been right on cue sans the Haynesville, which is likely attributable to higher-than-expected shut-ins from the play,” said Adkins and Freeman.

Growth from the region appears to rival the “2009-2011 growth seen out of the Haynesville,” and “we expect the play to be the “King of the Gas Shales” by 2015 at the latest.

“Much of the current constraints from an already rampant growth rate have been on the infrastructure side, which is reasonable given the play’s large aerial extent. However, this type of constraint is likely just a near-to-medium term issue that should be resolved by 2015 as well.”