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.
2 Comments
Thanks for the update Enno. Must be getting pretty saturated these days, especially in and around Karnes county. If we assume 1200km2 of relevant area in the county, approaching 6000 wells in the next few years and >2km/6500 feet for the average well, the average spacing between wells is approaching 100 meters. Maybe conservative drillers like Conoco will have room left but others likely out of space like in Bakken sweet spots – Sanish, Reunion Bay, Grail, Blue Buttes, etc.
At the very least, will be hard to ramp production for EF & Bakken without a leap in tech/recovery rates.
I believe you’re right Sjoerd. Thanks for commenting!