Eagle Ford – update through January 2020

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 January 2020.

Total production

At just over 1.3 million bo/d, January oil production was (after upcoming revisions) basically unchanged both m-o-m and y-o-y.

Supply Projection dashboard

As of last week, the horizontal rig count in this basin has fallen to just 37, down from 94 in February last year. This is not enough to sustain current production.

The following image, taken from our publicly available Supply projection dashboard, shows that if this number, as well as rig & well productivity, would not change (all admittedly unrealistic assumptions), then the long-term capacity of the basin would be below 0.9 million bo/d:

This does not even consider the extra shut-ins that are currently taking place due to the dramatic decline in oil prices.

Last week we hosted a webinar on this dashboard. If you missed it, you can still find a recording of it here: Supply Projection webinar recording

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. On a normalized basis (lateral length or proppants), results are somewhat lower.

Top operators

The top 3 operators in the basin (EOG, ConocoPhillips & Chesapeake) were all at or near the historical production record in January. Almost 95% of February production data is also already available in our subscription services.

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.

The 1,919 horizontal wells that began production in 2017 (dark orange curve) have, after producing just over 2 years (26 months), recovered 150 thousand barrels of oil as well as 0.7 Bcf of natural gas, on average.

Finally

Later this week we will have a post on Oklahoma, followed by one on all covered states early next week. We also plan to release a new monthly report this week.

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.