Eagle Ford – update through February 2019

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 22,421 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing since 2008, through February 2019.

February oil production came in at 1,22 million bo/d, the same rate of production as a year earlier. After revisions, it will be a little higher but still below the level at the end of last year. As is visible in the graph above, the contribution of wells that came online before 2018 was just about 50% in February.

The ‘Well quality’ tab reveals that the performance of the 1,800+ horizontal wells that began production in the main formations (Eagle Ford & Austin Chalk) in 2018 was equal to those that started a year earlier (see bottom chart). You can also find that typically, after 6 years on production, wells have declined to a production rate of about 20 bo/d. There are of course major regional variances, which I will show later in this post.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview reveals the relationship between production rates and cumulative production. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

In the 2nd tab, you will find a ranking of all counties in the Eagle Ford, based on total oil production from these horizontal wells through February. Karnes is #1, with over 700 million barrels of oil produced, since 2008.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how well productivity has evolved in the top 4 counties shown in this list.

The following screenshot comes from our advanced online analytics service:

The map shows the location of all the horizontal oil wells in these 4 counties (click on the image for a high-resolution version). The top right graph shows the average well performance over time, as measured by the cumulative oil recovery in the first 12 months.

DeWitt County is in the lead, with close to 190 thousand barrels of oil recovered in the first year on production, on average. However, total oil production in this county has dropped close to a multi-year low, as completion activity has dropped (not visible in this image). Only 152 wells came online in this county in 2018 (vs. 383 in 2014).

In the middle of next week we will have a new post on all covered states in the US.

We still offer free trials and demos in case you are curious to know what more you could learn from our analytics and data services: request a demo or trial.

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 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.