Enno Peters
This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here
These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 24,411 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through February 2020.
Total production
February oil production fell by 1% m-o-m, to just over 1.3 million bo/d. Although natural gas production fell by a similar amount to 6.5 Bcf/d, it has held up better over the years, due to lower decline rates (toggle “product” to gas to see this).
Supply Projection dashboard
As of last week, the horizontal rig count in this basin has fallen to just 26, down from 94 in February last year, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. If (hypothetically) such a level of drilling and completion would be sustained, oil production in this basin would fall over time to just 0.7 million bo/d, or about half the current output. You can see this in our publicly available Supply projection dashboard, if you only select this basin:
This does not consider the extra shut-ins or that completion activity is even lower and therefore the near-term drop will be far larger.
Well productivity
On average, well performance has not improved in the last 3 years as you’ll find in the bottom chart of the “Well quality” tab. Only selecting the oil wells (possible in our subscription services) shows a similar result:
As you can see, newer wells recover just shy of 190 thousand barrels of oil in the first 3 years on production, on average. This is probably more than 2/3rds of their oil EUR. Declines are steeper than in the other 2 major tight oil basins (Bakken & Permian) and in February 75% of all these horizontal oil wells (16.500) were below a production rate of 50 bo/d.
Top operators
The top 10 operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG, the clear number 1, was good for 20% of total oil production in the basin.
Advanced Insights
The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:
This “Ultimate recovery” overview reveals the relationship between production rates and cumulative production. Wells are grouped and averaged by the year in which production started.
Finally
Early next week we will have a new post on Pennsylvania, which released March production data a few days ago (already 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.
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4 Comments
I was playing with your data. And I ended looking for 2012 production levels. Something seemed a bit strange, with a few wells showing large output, over 800 bpd.
So, looking deeper, I realized that this came from an operator called “Verdun Oil&Gas”, which was formed in 2015, and seems to own wells that… have a rather good performance for 2012 wells. In facts, production of Verdun’s wells that first flowed in 2012 is higher than EOG’s wells from the same year.
So, is it just discrepancies from data… Or did they refrack some wells?
Hi Tita,
Yes, we also noticed some weird behavior in the production for Verdun recently. We’re a little short-staffed at the moment, but we’ll try to look into this in the coming 1-2 weeks. It doesn’t look like these wells have been refrac’ed, but there is quite a strange and significant jump in output from older wells.
We just looked closer at this case. Verdun claims that the older wells on at least one of the involved leases saw a huge uplift in production, which is why they got assigned most of the increase when a few new wells came online. Probably this is incorrect, but we have no way to make sure. So the total production is correct, but most likely we have assigned too much production to some of the older wells here. Hopefully the related data will be corrected over time.
Thank you very much for the research.
Yes, analysis can only be made out of data provided by operators. Impossible to make sure everything is absolutely correctly allocated.
Of course, it’s not significant…