Eagle Ford Well Production Profile- update through January 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 19014 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region (TRRC districts 1-5), that started producing since 2010, through January 2017.

As the graph shows, the steep production drop from March 2015 onward has almost halted since August 2016, and I expect that after revisions come in, production may show some growth again in the last couple of months. A little more than half of the decline since the March 2015 high has been replaced by new production.

The production profiles for all these wells are shown in the “Well quality” overview. They are averaged, and grouped by the year in which the wells started production. So far it appears that these production profiles do not significantly change at lower rates of production (10-3o bo/d).

The top graph in the “Well status” overview shows the number of new horizontal wells put on production each month in this region. New well additions have stabilized at a level of just over 100 per month, compared with over 400 at the end of 2014.

The performance of the largest operators is visualized in the last tab (“Top operators”). Since November 2016 Devon Energy has ramped up well completions, which has lead to a significant production increase compared with the low in September.

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 quarter in which they started production.

Over the past few years wells have been fracked with increasing volumes of proppant and water, which have lead to higher initial production rates. As you can see, this resulted in improved recovery trajectories, even though the shape of these curves haven’t changed much.

If you click in the legend on the wells that started production in early 2014, you can see that more recent wells, although having a bigger head start, appear to decline slightly faster as well, which may result in giving back some of these early gains.

The 2nd tab (“Cumulative production ranking”) ranks the counties in this area by cumulative production. You’ll notice that Karnes and De Witt counties have taken the lion share of oil production so far. If you switch to gas (using the “product” selection), you’ll find that Webb county is clearly leading in gas production.

In the “Well status map” tab you can see the location of all these wells, and find out where new wells have been brought online recently.

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.