Eagle Ford – update through July 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 24,965 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through July 2020.

Total production

Like the Bakken and the Permian, oil production in the Eagle Ford also continued to recover in July, to close to 1.1 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). But decline rates are higher here than in the other 2 tight oil basins, and in combination with the lack of new drilling output is falling steeper.

Supply Projection dashboard

The 15 rigs currently drilling horizontal wells (according to the Baker Hughes rig count), although a higher number than the 10 running in August, will not be able to sustain current production here. You can see this in our outlook for the basin if the rig count and well/rig productivity would stay constant (from our Supply projection dashboard):

This is of course simply a hypothetical case, but it shows that the outlook isn’t great unless activity levels rise significantly. This dashboard contains an interactive model, so you can create these projections by using your own assumptions on future rig counts and well/rig productivity. In our ShaleProfile Analytics service (Ultimate), you can even save the settings of various scenarios for future use.

Well productivity

A major issue for the basin is that well productivity hasn’t increased since 2017, as you will find in the “Well quality” tab. This is also visible in more detail in the following graph, which was taken from ShaleProfile Analytics service (Professional):

The chart shows how well results have changed in 6 counties in the Eagle Ford, based on the average cumulative oil recovered in the first 12 months.

You can see that in the counties with the best performing wells (DeWitt and Karnes), productivity already seems to have peaked in 2017, based on this metric.

Top operators

The 5 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG and ConocoPhillips still had a significant portion of their production curtailed in July.

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.

Finally

We just released a new report which you can find here: ShaleProfile’s October report on the 4 major tight oil basins

Next week we will have a post on gas production in Pennsylvania, which will release August production data in the coming days.

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.