Eagle Ford – update through November 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 25,337 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through November 2020.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford came in at just below 1.1 million bo/d in November, a level at which it had hovered for already 4 months. Natural gas output was also near a 6-year low at 5.3 Bcf/d.

Supply Projection

Although the horizontal rig count has tripled since the bottom in August, to 32 as of last week (source: Baker Hughes), this level is not yet sufficient to maintain current output as is visualized in the following graph:

The image above was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard.

Permit activity

The lack of sufficient interest is also visible in our new Permit Activity dashboard:

The previous (Q4 2020) and current quarter are on track for a total of below 300 permits for new horizontal wells, a near record low in the past decade.

If you’re interested in these permits, I recommend to sign up for a trial to explore this dashboard. With Oklahoma being completed in the coming days, we’re now tracking real-time new permits in all the major states. Other charts allow you to see which operators are actively requesting these permits, and where the permitted wells are located exactly.

Well status

With relatively few wells being completed and high decline rates, the basin is aging quite fast. This can be viewed in the Well Status dashboard within our subscription service:

The chart on the right shows the number of wells by oil production rate in the Eagle Ford. Only horizontal oil wells are included. As you’ll see, in November about 13 thousand of the 22 thousand wells in this area were below a production rate of 25 bo/d (incl. 2 thousand that didn’t produce any oil).

Top operators

The 5 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG is now producing almost twice as much as the number 2, Chesapeake.

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.

Note that since 2017 there have not been any productivity improvements, on average.

Finally

Folks are having a hard time in this part of Texas due to the extraordinary weather circumstances, our thoughts are with them!

Next week we will have a new post on gas production in Pennsylvania, which just released data for December (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.