Eagle Ford – update through May 2020

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 24,877 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through May 2020.

Total production

Oil production collapsed in May to 0.9 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions), a m-o-m decline of ~300 thousand bo/d. This brought output back to a level last seen 7 years ago.

Supply Projection dashboard

But as of last week, only 12 rigs were drilling horizontal wells in this basin, according to the Baker Hughes rig count, far below the activity seen in 2013  (>200 rigs).  If it holds at this level, and assuming no changes in rig or well productivity, then our projection has output falling to below 0.5 million bo/d in 4 years, as you can view in our Supply projection dashboard:

Top operators

The 8 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. The top 3, EOG, ConocoPhillips & Chesapeake, all sharply reduced output in May (by 30-50% compared with earlier in the year).

The well performance of all major operators can be easily compared within our ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional) service, as you can see in the following screenshot.

On the right side you can see all the operators with at least 100 operated wells, ranked by their average cumulative oil recovered in the first 2 years. The left side shows all their wells, colored by the same metric. The dashboards in our services are interactive, so clicking on an operator will exactly show the position of its wells. The thickness of the lines indicates the relative well count.

On this metric, Devon Energy is clearly in the lead, as its 874 oil wells with at least 2 years of production history recovered 233 thousand barrels of oil in their first 2 years, on average. Sanchez, which just emerged from bankruptcy, is one of the poorest performers, with less than 80 thousand barrels of oil recovered in the same time frame.

Advanced Insights

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.

Finally

Early next week we will have a post on gas production in Pennsylvania and the Haynesville.

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.