Unconventional gas resources have dramatically changed the future energy landscape. Developing these resources involves substantial risk. Such risk can be mitigated if information gathered at initial stages of the development of a field is used efficiently and effectively to guide future development. A variety of tools-such as decline-curve analysis (DCA), type-curve analysis, simulator history matching, and artificial intelligence (AI)-is used to that effect. These tools accomplish partially overlapping but different tasks. Additional tools that could not only facilitate the analysis of historical data but also guide future development would be of value. In this work, we propose an efficient methodology that can use historical production data from existing wells to answer questions such as the following: Which wells will behave similarly? Which wells will behave differently from each other or from standard expectations? Which factors will contribute to these differences? How can data from existing wells be used to anticipate the performance of new wells? The proposed methodology relies on standard principal-component analysis (PCA) and principal-component regression (PCR). The application of PCA to historical production data from twelve wells in the Holly Branch field quickly identified wells with distinct behavior. The subsequent investigation of pressure and the completion data for these wells revealed reasons for such distinct behavior. Finally, a simple linear model was built with PCR, with good ability to predict production from new wells, as assessed through cross-validation. The value of the efficiency offered by the proposed methodology would be much higher for larger data sets, for which manual analysis of production data is more cumbersome.