Eagle Ford – update through May 2018

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 through May from 20,900 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008.

In the first 5 months of this year, oil production from these wells has hovered around a level of 1.2 million barrels of oil per day. This was a few percent above the output 12 months earlier, but lower than the level reached in Q4 last year.

Although well performance has also steadily shown improvements here over the past years, most of it has come from better initial (<12 months) productivity, as shown in the ‘Well quality’ tab. The 1,602 wells that started producing in 2012, in the Eagle Ford or Austin Chalk formations, peaked at ~300 bo/d, while the 1,687 wells that started 5 years later did so at more than double this rate.

Completion activity is still well below the peak in 2014 (~150 wells/month in 2018, vs. over 350 wells/month in 2014).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

In this “Ultimate Recovery” overview the relationship between production rates, and cumulative production is revealed. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started.

If you select only the Austin Chalk formation (using the ‘Formation’ selection), you’ll see that this formation is receiving more attention recently, with almost 100 wells completed in 2017, and that since 2016 their performance is better than comparable Eagle Ford wells.

Later this week I will have a new post on the Niobrara region.

We just added a new dashboard in our ShaleProfile Analytics service, with which it is easy to see the gas/oil ratio across a basin, how this ratio has changed over time, and whether it has affected well productivity. See here a screenshot for this dashboard with the Eagle Ford selected (right-click and view or download to see the high-resolution version):

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 data reports.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentations 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.