Eagle Ford Shale Oil Production – update through February 2017

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 19149 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region (TRRC districts 1-5), that started producing since 2010, through February 2017.

After a multi-year low in the 2nd half of 2016, oil production in this region rose again in February, as did gas production. Tooltips can tell you that ~4500 new horizontal wells were brought online in 2014, ~3000 in 2015, and ~1500 in 2016. This dramatic decline in activity caused the sharp drop in production, even though well productivities were up on average, especially in the initial production phase.

This can be seen in the “Well quality” tab, where the production profiles for all these wells are shown, averaged by the year in which production started. If you switch “Chart type” to “normal”, the vertical axis will be set to linear, and this will reveal more clearly the extent of these improvements. As time goes by, the production rate profiles appear to converge, suggesting that longer term performance has changed less dramatically.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

The “Ultimate Recovery” overview shows how all these horizontal wells are heading towards their ultimate recovery, as their production rates slow down over time. They are grouped by the year in which they started production. This provides another view on the same changes in well productivity over time.

If you use the “County” selection to only select “Karnes” county, which is where the heart of the oil production in the Eagle Ford is, you can see that well performance there appears to have stagnated since 2014, despite large increases in frac volumes.

In the “Well status map” tab the location and status of all these horizontal wells are displayed. It appears that the wells that were brought online in February were almost all located close to the central line going through the Eagle Ford region, which will be highlighted by clicking on the “First flow” category in the legend.

On Thursday I plan another update on the Permian.

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. Individual well profiles are estimated from well status & lease production data, as this data is not provided by the RRC. Detailed location data is available for more than 90% of the wells displayed; the remaining wells are shown near the center of the county in which they are located. I’ve no spud, DUC, or plugging information on wells & DUCs in Texas, so these statuses are unavailable. Formation data in Texas is only available on lease level; therefore, in cases where wells on the same lease are drilled in different formations, this information is not accurate.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentation has 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.