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 26,083 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through July.
Total production
Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford was flat for the 4th consecutive month in July, at 1.1 million b/d (Hz. wells only, after upcoming revisions). Natural gas production was also unchanged at about 5.7 Bcf/d. Only 560 horizontal wells were completed in the first 7 months of this year, fewer than half the number in 2019 during the same time frame (1,208), and the lowest number in a decade.
Supply projection
The number of horizontal rigs in the Eagle Ford however increased to 43 as of last week (according to Baker Hughes), the highest in 1.5 years. Last month we analyzed what the outlook would be in Karnes, where only 3 rigs were active at the time. But in the last month 4 more rigs were added, significantly changing the dire outlook we shared. For the Eagle Ford overall, we expect that with the current amount of drilling activity, tight oil production should remain on a plateau for quite some time:

The outlook is more positive for natural gas production, which should soon start rising again under current conditions:

Well performance
The 4 major players in this basin, EOG, ConocoPhillips, Marathon and Chesapeake, all saw stagnating or declining well productivity in recent years:

This chart shows the well performance, as measured by the average cumulative oil recovered in the first 12 months, normalized for lateral length, by operator and by year of first production. On this basis, results have not improved since 2012. We determine the lateral length based on the completed interval of these horizontal wells, or from their directional surveys (if the interval is not provided).
Top operators
The output and well locations of the 13 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab.
Finally
The Wall Street Journal published an article last Sunday on the surging demand in Energy, and the lack of investment in fossil fuels, for which they also used Novi Insight Engine: Behind the Energy Crisis: Fossil Fuel Investment Drops, and Renewables Aren’t Ready
Our next post will be on Pennsylvania, which recently released August production data (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.