Eagle Ford – update through April 2020

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 24,696 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through April 2020.

Total production

Oil production in the basin fell in April to 1.25 million bo/d, a m-o-m decline of 100 thousand bo/d. This drop was similar in size as experienced in August 2017 when Harvey hit the area. Based on preliminary data, I expect a steeper one in May.

Supply Projection dashboard

As of last week, only 13 rigs were drilling horizontal wells here, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. This is just a tenth of the number active in the Permian Basin (123) and 95% lower compared with May 2012 (267). If it holds at this level, and assuming no changes in rig or well productivity, then our projection sees output falling to close to 0.7 million b/d by the end of next year, as you can find in our Supply projection dashboard:

Well productivity

Well productivity hasn’t changed since 2017, on average. You can see this clearly in the “Well quality” tab, which contains the production profiles for all these wells, and select the 2017 vintage in the color legend.

Top operators

The 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG showed the largest absolute decline in April, although it still is the largest producer. Its well performance has deteriorated since 2018, as is shown in this screenshot from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional):

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview reveals the relationship between production rates and cumulative production. Wells are grouped and averaged by the year in which production started.

Finally

Later this week we will have a post on gas production in Pennsylvania, which last week released data through May (already available in our subscription services).

Production and completion data is subject to revisions, especially for the last few months.

Sources

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• Texas RRC. Production data is provided on lease level. Individual well production data is estimated from a range of data sources, including regular well tests, and pending lease reports.
• FracFocus.org

Brief manual

The presentations above have many interactive features:

• You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.
• Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items. You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.
• Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.
• You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.
• By clicking on the legend you can highlight the related data.
• Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.
• The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.
• If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Enno Peters

Enno Peters is General Manager at Novi, where he has build an AI-driven data & analytics platform tailored for oil & gas operators and energy investors. Prior to Novi, Enno founded ShaleProfile which was acquired by Novi late 2021.