Eagle Ford – update through July 2018

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 21,344 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008, through July.

In July 228 horizontal wells started production, the highest number in more than 3 years. Although the graph above shows a dip in production in July, this is partially because of reporting lag, and I expect that when these wells have a full month on production in August total output will show a bump.

Average production profiles haven’t changed much in the past couple of years, especially since 2017, as you can see in the ‘Well quality’ tab. Laterals (at ~ 7k feet) didn’t get any longer in 2018, while proppant intensity increased with about 10%. More information on these trends can be learned in our ShaleProfile Analytics service.

EOG is already for more than 5 years the top oil producer in this area, and it currently operates about 20% of total production capacity (“Top operators”).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

In this “Ultimate Recovery” overview, the relationship between production rates and cumulative production is revealed. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

These curves appear to bend slightly downwards, hinting at a hyperbolic decline with a b-value smaller than 1. Production profiles with a harmonic decline (= hyperbolic decline with a b-value of 1) show up on this type of plot as a straight line.

The wells that started in 2014 (the year which saw the greatest number of new producers), are on track to recover on average 150 thousand barrels of oil (and ~0.6 Bcf of natural gas) before hitting a production rate of 30 bo/d.

Devon and ConocoPhillips are still showing the best well results on average, as measured by the cumulative oil production in the first 2 years (see “Productivity ranking”).

Early next week we will have a post on all 10 covered US states.

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. 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 data reports.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentations 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.