Eagle Ford – update through February 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 through January 2018 from 20,465 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region (TRRC districts 1-4), that started producing since 2010.

With more production data for the end of last year made available by the Texas RRC, we can now see that oil production from these horizontal wells grew by ~10% year over year. Given this typical revision pattern for Texas, I expect that we’ll eventually also see February production significantly higher than shown in the above graph, to close to 1.3 million barrels of oil per day.

A combination of higher drilling and completion activity, and better initial well performance, is  causing growth in this basin; based on preliminary data 1,725 wells started producing in 2017, vs 1,500 in 2016. And as the ‘Well quality’ overview shows, these newer wells peaked at a rate of 686 bo/d in their first full calendar month (month 2), versus 535 bo/d for the year before, a 28% increase.

Ignoring the last 2 incomplete months, we can see in the final tab (‘Top operators’) that EOG and Chesapeake, the 2 leading oil operators, are back to their previous output records.

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.

The wells that started in Q4 2017 had clearly the best start ever, recovering 56 thousand barrels of oil in the first 3 calendar months. Part of this may have been a shift from gas to oil wells, as their gas output is a little lower (change ‘Product’ to gas to see this).

Early next week I will have a post on the Permian, followed by one on all 10 covered states in the US

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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.