Eagle Ford – update through August 2018

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

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 21,540 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008, through August.

Since the low point two years ago, oil production in the Eagle Ford has kept growing. I expect that after revisions August production will eventually come in at around 1.3 million bo/d (~100 kbo/d higher than shown now).

Natural gas production follows a very similar pattern. If you switch ‘Product’ to gas, you’ll find that in 2018 total gas production was just below 6 Bcf/d.

The underlying decline is clearly visible in this graph; you can see that the horizontal wells from before 2015 peaked at over 1.6 million bo/d in Dec 2014 and that the same group produced just 0.3 million bo/d in August.

The main reason for the recent increase in oil production is not higher well productivity, as this has not significantly changed in the past 2 years (see ‘Well quality’). But about 5 wells have been completed every day in 2017 & 2018, on average, versus 4 in 2016.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

In this “Ultimate Recovery” overview, the relationship between production rates and cumulative production is revealed. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

Declines here are steeper than in the Permian or the Bakken, and that means that a greater part of the oil EUR is recovered in the first year on production (about half).

I wanted to have a closer look at the well performance of the two leading operators, EOG & ConocoPhillips. Here you’ll find this comparison, for horizontal wells that started between 2014 & 2017, taken from our ShaleProfile Analytics service:

[Click on the image to see it full size]

For each operator & year combination, you can find a well performance curve on the right plot. Striking here is the difference in well behavior between these two operators. EOGs wells decline in a fairly straight line from the peak, while the wells operated by ConocoPhillips were able to maintain a higher flow rate for several months before they displayed a steepening of the decline.

Early next week we will have a post on the Permian again.

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

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 data reports.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentations 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.