Eagle Ford Well Production – update through October 2016

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 18657 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region (TRRC districts 1-5), through October 2016.

Oil production declined further in October, albeit at a smaller pace than in the previous months. Fewer than 1200 horizontal wells were put on production in 2016, through October, compared with over 2600 a year earlier, and more than 3700 in 2014.

Despite this steep drop in completions, there are few signs that high grading increased well productivity. In the “Well quality” tab we can see that 2015 wells track the performance of 2014 wells rather closely, and that 2016 wells are faring a little worse compared with 2015 wells.

With few new completions, and steeper declines than in the Bakken or Permian, the field is ageing rather rapidly. The bottom graph in the “Well status” view shows that in October about 80% of all horizontal wells in this region produced less than 75 bo/d.

In the “Top Operators” you’ll notice that of the 5 largest operators, only Chesapeake has increased oil production in 2016. Oil production of Devon Energy declined by more than half in 2016, all due to natural decline.

The new ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

The “Ultimate Recovery” overview shows how the 2010-2015 wells are heading towards their ultimate recovery.

It is interesting to see here that the initial lead that 2015 wells had over 2014 wells becomes smaller over time. This shows that higher initial productivity doesn’t necessarily result in a larger ultimate recovery, but may accelerate production forwards. The same effect can be seen for 2016 wells, if you change the “Show wells by” selection to “Quarter of first flow”; the lead that they start with over 2014 wells also diminishes with time. I haven’t seen this effect so clearly yet in the other basins.

On Tuesday I will have a post on the Permian, followed by an update on all covered states in the US on Friday.

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. Individual well profiles are estimated from well status & lease production data, as this data is not provided by the RRC. Detailed location data is available for more than 90% of the wells displayed; the remaining wells are shown near the center of the county in which they are located. I’ve no spud, DUC, or plugging information on wells & DUCs in Texas, so these statuses are unavailable. Formation data in Texas is only available on lease level; therefore, in cases where wells on the same lease are drilled in different formations, this information is not accurate.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentation has 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.