Eagle Ford – update through December 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 22,067 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008, through December.

December oil production, close to 1.3 million bo/d, barely changed y-o-y. Just over 1,800 new horizontal wells were able to counter the ~45% decline in legacy production in 2018.

Gas production hovered last year just below 6 Bcf/d.

Initial well performance in the 2 main formations (Eagle Ford & Austin Chalk) was basically unchanged in 2018, as the bottom graph in ‘Well quality’ tab reveals. The over 3,500 horizontal wells that started since 2017 are on a path to recover 150 thousand barrels of oil in the first 2 years on production, on average, in addition to about 0.7 Bcf of natural gas.

The leading operator in this basin, EOG, has been increasing output throughout 2018, and exited the year at twice the rate than the number 2, ConocoPhillips (see “Top operators”).

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 quarter in which production started.

You can see here that the bulk of the wells that began production since 2011 are going to recover on average between 150 and 200 thousand barrels of oil, before hitting a production rate of 10 bo/d. This does however also include a significant number of gas wells. Filtering on well type (oil/gas) is a subscriber-only feature.

The 4th tab ranks operators by the average cumulative oil production in the first 2 years. Of the larger operators (>100 operated horizontal wells), Devon, ConocoPhillips and Encana are showing the best results according to this metric.

If you missed our briefing on all the major tight oil basins on enelyst last Tuesday, you can still read the full update by entering our channel here: ShaleProfile channel on enelyst. Registering is free: enelyst registration page.

Early next week we will have a post on all the 11 states that we publicly cover in the US (Oklahoma is currently for subscribers only).

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 lease 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.