Eagle Ford – update through March 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 25,474 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through March.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford recovered in March by 200 thousand bo/d to almost 1.1 million bo/d, while natural gas output came in at over 5.5 Bcf/d (after upcoming revisions, horizontal wells only).

Well performance

Well results are not higher (but neither lower) than in 2017, on average, as the bottom chart in the ‘Well quality’ tab shows.

Just a single county, Karnes, is responsible for over a quarter of oil production. Here we show a ranking of all operators in Karnes, by the average cumulative oil production in the first 2 years that their wells were on production:

The 34 wells that INPEX, a Japanese company, currently operates and that already produced for at least 2 years, show the best results. On average, these wells recovered 248 thousand barrels of oil. EOG, the largest operator holds the 6th position; its 744 wells recovered 196 thousand bbl. This image was taken from our Productivity Ranking dashboard.

Top operators

The output and location of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. The gap between EOG and ConocoPhillips, the numbers 1 and 2 respectively, narrowed to 55 thousand bo/d. EOG is suffering from deteriorating well performance, which you can see in this screenshot:

The chart on the right plots the performance by vintage; the y-axis represents the average production rate (b/d), while the x-axis displays cumulative production. This reveals at least 2 findings:

• all its vintages are trending towards an EOR shy of 300,000 bbl
• the 237 wells that it completed last year recovered on average 81 thousand barrels of oil in the first 5 months, vs. 113 thousand barrels that its wells completed in 2017 made in the same time frame.

Finally

Our next post will be on Pennsylvania, which just released April production data (already 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.