Eagle Ford – update through June 2021

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 25,879 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through June.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford was flat for the 3rd consecutive month in June, at 1.1 million b/d (Hz. wells only, after upcoming revisions). The first time the Eagle Ford produced at this level was 8 years earlier, when WTI was almost at $100/bbl. Natural gas production fell in June to about 5.6 Bcf/d.

Supply projection

The number of horizontal rigs in the Eagle Ford has remained at 40 during the past month (according to Baker Hughes). Only 3 of those rigs are drilling in Karnes County, the lowest number in more than a decade, and down from 10 earlier this year. This county is still responsible for 30% of the oil produced in the Eagle Ford. Our Supply Projection dashboard shows what would happen if the rig count would remain at 3 in Karnes:

As the bottom graph here shows, 3 rigs would only be able to sustain a long-term output of not much more than 100 thousand b/d, given current well & rig productivity, compared with 300 thousand b/d currently.

Well performance

Can poorer well results explain the reduced interest in Karnes? From our Production Profiles dashboard:

The chart on the right shows that average well productivity has fallen since 2017. All vintages are trending towards an EUR of less than 300 thousand barrels of oil, before hitting a production rate of 10 b/d. On the map the well locations of all the included wells are visible, and colored by operator.

The well performance picture becomes worse after we normalize for lateral length:

This chart shows how average performance, as measured by the cumulative oil recovered in the first year on production, normalized for lateral length, has evolved over time. The wells that were completed in 2020, and have produced for at least a year, recovered only 22.3 thousand barrels of oil, per 1,000′ of lateral length.

Analyzing the data in more detail doesn’t indicate that the abnormal shut-ins during the last 1.5 years were responsible for this deterioration.

Top operators

The output and well locations of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. ConocoPhillips and Marathon were both producing at a 1-year high in June. Devon Energy’s production is down by over 75% since the start of 2016.

Finally

Our next post will be on Pennsylvania, which released July production data a while back. The other 2 states in Appalachia recently reported Q2 production data, which is 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.

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.