Eagle Ford – update through September 2018

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 21,698 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008, through September.

Although from the above graph it appears that oil production in the Eagle Ford has moved sideways in 2018, due to the typical reporting lag in Texas, I expect to see that after revisions production from horizontal wells will come in at 1.3 – 1.4 million bo/d in September. That would be the highest level in the past 2.5 years, but still well below the 2015 peak.

One reason for that is that well productivity hasn’t increased so much in the past 4 years, as you’ll see in the ‘Well quality’ tab. This despite that laterals have gotten longer (by about 1/3rd), and more frac sand is typically used nowadays (it more than doubled). You’ll be able to normalize for these factors in our online Analytics service.

The basin is aging rather rapidly, and in September almost 80% of these horizontal wells were producing below 50 bo/d, as can be seen in the bottom plot of the ‘Well status’ overview. However, that number does include about 3,000 gas wells as well (filtering these is a subscription-only feature).

The 2 leading operators, EOG & ConocoPhillips, either set new production records in September, or were close (‘Top operators’).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

In this “Ultimate Recovery” overview, the relationship between production rates and cumulative production is revealed. Wells are grouped by the year in which production started. I’ve preselected the Austin Chalk and Eagle Ford formations.

As you can see, wells from the 2010-2012 time frame are now on average below 20 bo/d, after having recovered 120-150 thousand barrels of oil (and 0.7-1 Bcf of natural gas). Wells that started in 2017 peaked at a rate of 664 bo/d, and declined to a level of 174 bo/d in the next 8 months, having recovered just over 100 thousand barrels of oil. More recent and granular data can be found if you select to group the wells by quarter or month of first production (using the ‘Show wells by’ selection).

The WSJ just published an interesting article in which they compared actual verses operator reported well performance (Update: it now appears to be behind a paywall). Many of our subscribers and readers have told us that they value our services due to the independent and accurate reporting of production data.

In February we will be at the NAPE summit in Houston, so please stop by our booth if you are joining this event as well.

Early next week we will have a post on the Permian again, on which we also have a more detailed update in our upcoming enelyst chat on Tuesday.

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. 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 data reports.
• FracFocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentations 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.