Eagle Ford – update through August 2021

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 26,383 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through August.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford was flat for the 5th consecutive month in August, at 1.1 million b/d (Hz. wells only, after upcoming revisions). Natural gas production came in at 5.7 Bcf/d, a level at which it has also hovered around now for several months.

Supply projection

Now that the number of horizontal rigs in the Eagle Ford has increased to 48 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes), we foresee a small amount of growth in output ahead, especially if more rigs are returned in the months ahead. From our Supply Projection dashboard:

As we shared last month, the outlook is better for natural gas production, and during the past month this improved even further. In Webb County, in the gas window of the basin, currently 11 rigs are drilling horizontal wells, close to the highest level within the last 6 years. This could cause a doubling of natural gas output, from 2 Bcf/d to more than 4 Bcf/d, in 3 years from now:

Well performance – natural gas wells

In this post I wanted to take a closer look at how the well productivity of natural gas wells has changed in the Eagle Ford:

This chart shows the production profiles of all natural gas wells in the Eagle Ford (average gas rate vs. cumulative gas production), by vintage, with a production start of 2016 or later. Note that there has been a significant improvement in results in the last 2 years. In contrast, we have shown several times that the productivity of oil wells has deteriorated in the last few years, especially after taking into account the increase in lateral lengths.

Top operators

The output and well locations of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. All the operators in the top 6 have seen their output decline in the last 2 years. Chesapeake’s oil output has fallen by almost half in the past 1.5 years. This operator has greatly reduced completion activity, as you can see in the following chart:

Finally

Our next post will be on Pennsylvania, which just released September production data (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.