Eagle Ford – update through February 2021

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 25,474 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through February.

Total production

Like its bigger cousin the Permian (see here), tight oil production in the Eagle Ford was badly affected by the winter freeze in February. Output fell by about 150 thousand bo/d, to below 900 thousand bo/d (hz. wells only), the lowest level in almost 8 years. Still, the downturn was short-lived and March production should be back up to above 1 million bo/d.

Supply Projection

The horizontal rig count has wildly fluctuated in this play over the last decade (source: Baker Hughes); it reached a top of 267 rigs in May 2012 and after several wild periods bottomed in August last year at 10 rigs. Since then, 27 rigs have returned and at this level (37 rigs) the outlook is no longer so dire:

As you can see in the bottom chart, an output of just over 1 million bo/d can be sustained here by this level of activity, all else being equal.

Well performance

Unlike the Permian, well productivity has not improved in recent years, on average, as you will find in the “Well quality” tab. Wells recover on average 172 thousand barrels of oil in the first 3 years on production (although of course there are wide variances). After filtering out a small number of gas wells, and normalizing for lateral length, a striking picture emerges:

As the chart on the right shows, average well performance, on a normalized basis, has hardly changed in the Eagle Ford in the past decade, and is slightly down from the peak in 2017.

In the interactive version of this dashboard, you can also easily filter to specific areas or operators, and also compare operators, counties or individual wells.

Top operators

The output and location of the 6 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. Operators are struggling here; all were at or near multi-year lows in February.

Finally

Next week we’re back with a post on Pennsylvania, which  just released March production data (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.

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.