Enno Peters
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 23,149 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through June 2019.
Oil production came in at 1.3 million bo/d in June, unchanged from the month before. Since March, the horizontal rig count in this basin has dropped from 82 to 62, the lowest number in the past 1.5 year. Natural gas production was 6.2 Bcf/d, almost back to the level in December last year.
In the “Well quality” tab, the performance of all these wells can be found. It reveals that after many years of improvements, since 2017 well productivity has no longer increased. We find that on a normalized basis (lateral length) 2018 results were even a bit lower than a year before.
This is the same conclusion that this WSJ article from yesterday reached: Shale Boom Is Slowing Just When the World Needs Oil Most (behind paywall).
Using our analytics service, they found that EOG’s performance in the Eagle Ford has deteriorated, on a normalized basis. See here the dashboard they used for this analysis:
The chart shows that the average well that started in Q2 2016 outperformed the wells that began 1 and 2 years later, based on the first 24 months cumulative oil production per horizontal lateral foot.
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.
Here you can also find that well productivity did not improve further in 2018 (while laterals got longer and proppant intensity increased further).
The following dashboard, also from our advanced analytics service, displays the total production in the top 5 oil-producing counties in The Eagle Ford.
Karnes is well ahead of the other counties. But only Gonzales is at a multi-year high.
Tomorrow, Tuesday October 1st, at noon (ET), we will present a new monthly briefing (~20 minutes) on all the major tight oil basins in the US, in our ShaleProfile channel on enelyst. Registering is free: enelyst registration page.
Early next week we will have a new post on all covered states in the US.
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 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.
News, trends and data for the US upstream industry
Novi Energy Newsletter
7 Comments
Hi Enno,
I was wondering what causes the difference in well count between the “Where is the Eagle Ford” and “How much is produced” views? Karnes has 3437 views in the former and 3833 in the latter.
Cheers,
Sjoerd
Hi Sjoerd,
Good catch. The former only showed the number of wells in the actual “Eagle Ford” formation. This has now been changed to include all formations in the area. It now shows that there are 3,947 wells in Karnes.
That also includes a small number of wells without production start, which are excluded in the 2nd dashboard.
What is the remaining inventory in Karnes, from your dashboard it seems like Swiss cheese already…
I think that’s an underrated question. Tough to answer. If you look at Marathon, however, they appear to have drilled much more densely in Karnes than the other large players so far. By my estimate they are at around 50 acres per well. They appear to be slowing down their drilling in Karnes in recent years. I think there are many variables at play here, but if you put the entire productive area of Karnes at that density you’d be looking at something like 6000 wells in total for Karnes. Encana is around 75 acres per well and has been performing poorly recently. Will be interesting to watch how both develop over the coming years – I’d put money on Marathon’s production in the county dropping and wouldn’t be surprised if Encana’s dropped too.
Enno,
Some of the older vintages of wells show an increase in production in June 2019 from prior months, i.e. 2011, 2013, and 2015. 2011 is probably the most notable on a % basis.
Just curious if you had any insights here, i.e. is this wells being reactivated, refracs, etc…?
Thanks,
Mike
Michael,
Yes, we also noticed this. It is rather strange, and I can’t explain it. It happens especially for Murphy and EOG, but not exclusively. For July (available in our service) it seems to have dropped a bit back to normal, but not completely.
For Murphy, we are seeing some strange data being reported by the RRC. See for example this lease, which has just one old well on it. In June production jumped to over 150 thousand barrels. Nu further completions were reported on this lease. Not sure what is going on, but we’ll monitor it.
EOG is refracking, desperate to show production is holding up could be one theory?