Eagle Ford – update through November 2022

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 28,217 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through November.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford came in at just below 1.1 million b/d in November 2022, basically unchanged compared with a year earlier. As production for about 2-3% of the wells has not yet been reported for November, the chart above shows a lower figure. Natural gas production did rise by about 10% from a year earlier to well above 6 Bcf/d (switch product to ‘gas’ to see the increase).

Drilling Activity

Drilling activity has remained unchanged since June last year; last week 79 rigs were drilling horizontal wells (source: Baker Hughes):

Well performance

In this recent WSJ article it was noted that well productivity has fallen in the Permian (behind paywall): U.S. Shale Boom Shows Signs of Peaking as Big Oil Wells Disappear

In the Eagle Ford we can see that trend has already been longer active:

In the top chart you can find that on a normalized basis (normalizing productivity for differences in lateral length), we see that recent well results in the core part of the basin, the Central Eagle Ford, are now lower than 7 years ago, and 30% below the peak in 2017.

Operator productivity ranking

In the next graph we’ll take a closer look at the performance of all the major unconventional operators in the Eagle Ford in recent years.

ConocoPhillips shows the best performance in recent years; its 331 horizontal oil wells that were completed since 2020 have recovered on average 135 thousand barrels of oil during the first 6 months.

Top operators

The output and well locations of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG’s production last November was close to its lowest output in almost a decade.

Finally

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.

Key Takeaways

• November 2022 Eagle Ford tight oil production was just below 1.1 million b/d, essentially unchanged versus a year earlier.
• November 2022 Eagle Ford natural gas production rose about 10% year over year to well above 6 Bcf/d.
• About 2–3% of Eagle Ford wells had not yet reported November production data, temporarily understating the latest totals.
• Since June 2022, Eagle Ford drilling activity stayed flat, with 79 rigs drilling horizontal wells last week per Baker Hughes.
• Central Eagle Ford normalized well productivity is 30% below the 2017 peak and lower than levels from seven years ago.
• ConocoPhillips averaged 135 thousand barrels of oil in first-6-month cumulative production across 331 Eagle Ford horizontal oil wells completed since 2020.
• EOG Resources’ November production in the Eagle Ford was close to its lowest output in almost a decade.