Eagle Ford – update through January 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 January.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford was flat m-o-m in January, at about 1.05 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). Compared with a year earlier, output was down by 300 thousand barrels of oil.

Supply Projection

The rig count has steadily increased in the past couple of months, and as of last week 37 rigs have been drilling horizontal wells here (source: Baker Hughes).

According to our supply projection model, this still isn’t sufficient to maintain tight oil output in the basin, but it should already be able to sustain natural gas production at just over 5 Bcf/d:

These images were taken from our Supply Projection dashboard, by selecting this basin and showing the results for both oil & gas.

Well status

About 63% of the wells are now below 25 b/d (see the bottom chart in the 3rd tab), although this number also includes the gas wells in this area. In our post last week on North Dakota, we saw that this metric was just over 40% there.

Top operators

The output and location of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab.

How did well productivity change for the top 4 of these operators (EOG, Chesapeake, ConocoPhillips & Marathon)?

In the above screenshot from our Productivity Over Time dashboard, you can see the well locations of these 4 operators in the core of the Eagle Ford. I’ve only selected the oil wells that began producing since 2012. In the top-right chart, their average well performance is visualized, based on the average cumulative oil recovered in the first 18 months, by production start year. During these first 18 months, typically just over half of the EUR is recovered in this area.

ConocoPhillips has consistently outperformed the others on this metric. For example, the 153 horizontal oil wells that it brought online in these counties in 2018 recovered on average 220 thousand barrels of oil in the first 18 months. EOG’s performance has been sliding since 2017 and was in 2019 (the last year available due to the metric chosen) below the others.

The bottom chart displays the trends in lateral length & proppant loadings for these 4 operators. Chesapeake has the longest laterals, while ConocoPhillips used the most proppants in recent years.

Finally

Later this week we will have a new post on the Haynesville, followed by one on Pennsylvania early next week, which just released February 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.