Eagle Ford – update through July 2022

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 27,476 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 has hovered at around 1.05 million b/d since the start of this year, near the lowest levels in 9 years, and came in at just above 1 million in July (there will still be some minor upward revisions). If you switch product to ‘gas’, you’ll see that the picture for natural gas is rather different, and that it has been increasing in the last 2 years to just over 6 Bcf/d.

Drilling Activity

Drilling activity has greatly increased from the lows in 2020, but with 78 rigs drilling horizontal wells (source: Baker Hughes) of which 73 focused on oil, activity is unchanged in the last 5 months:

Well performance

Next, we’ll take a closer look at productivity trends in the basin. In the 3rd tab of the interactive presentation above, you will find the production profiles of all wells in the main Eagle Ford formations. So far it is clear that the wells that came online in 2021 are performing slightly better than in earlier years, but it also appears that the wells that began this year are lagging behind.

On a normalized basis (normalizing productivity for differences in lateral length), we find that well results have stagnated in the last 6 years, with the horizontal wells starting this year so far under-performing the average in this time frame:

Well status

In the 4th tab of the interactive presentation, you will find that over 40% of the 27k horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford now produce less than 10 b/d

Top operators

The output and well locations of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. Oil production of the 4 largest producers in the basin, EOG Resources, ConocoPhillips, Marathon, and Chesapeake has steadily fallen over the years. The increase for Devon in June was driven by its acquisition of Validus Energy.

Finally

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.