Enno Peters
This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here
This presentation contains the latest oil production data from 16881 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford, until March, based on the latest production data from the Texas RRC.
A few observations/comments:
- This update includes for the first time also horizontal wells from gas leases, and therefore also condensate production (which I count as oil). Also, I now include all horizontal wells in the area that constitutes the 5 RRC districts in which the Eagle Ford is located. Therefore, a few hundred horizontal wells in this presentation are drilled in other formations, such as the Austin Chalk. These factors explain the big increase in overall reported production, compared with last months update.
- As I don’t report gas production, it may be good to know that the total gas to oil ratio for all wells in this presentation was about 4:1 (MCF:bo). Of course, there can be major differences between wells/areas/operators.
- It is clear that total oil production is declining rapidly these months. The total newly producing wells in the first quarter last year was 1044 wells, vs 276 reported so far. Because wells in the Eagle Ford decline faster, for longer, compared with wells in the Bakken, the overall decline is also higher, during this period of few completions.
- As always for Texas, major revisions are still likely for the last few months. I expect that March production may still be revised upwards by around 10%. I am still collecting more revision data, to be able to say more about this in the future.
By next week Thursday/Friday, I will have another post on the Permian.
====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 selected items, and include or exclude categories.
- 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.
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6 Comments
Enno,
Thanks for the update. I notice the 2015 vintage wells are having a few problems, dropping below the cums for previous years. Do you think there is enough history in your numbers to make this conclusion, or still a little too early to tell?
Meanwhile 2016 seems to have jumped out of the starting blocks with a rush. It will be interesting to see if it can be maintained, or if it drops away even faster than 2015.
Toolpush,
I’m often also interested in these questions.
My favorite method to answer this is by:
1. Go to the Well Quality tab
2. Filter on the “first flow” to only look at wells that started e.g. since 2014
3. Group the wells by “Quarter of first flow” (or even Month on first flow), so we can see on a finer granularity what has been happening with these wells
4. Then, by clicking through the items in the legend, each curve is highlighted, and can be easily compared.
If I do that, I see that wells in the first half of 2015 seem to be on a worse path than 2014 wells.
However, wells since then have started on a better path so far, and it’s too early to tell what they will do between 5-10 months on production, which is the period where newer wells have been dropping more lately.
Note that this period of performance improvement overlaps significantly with the reduced number of wells being brought online (you can see this in the WellStatus tab, by filtering on “first flow”).
Maybe the early wells represented the effect of declining good drilling spaces (representative of the boom) and the new ones represent a high grading. Not saying this is the explanation but it seems to fit the events.
I am having trouble getting your data to match other information such as IHS Energy. For Instance Baytex is a small operator in the Eagleford and I see 2 wells on IHS which were brought on in 2014, the Heard Bower East 5H and Heard Bower Central 4H. Through April, 2016, these wells have cumulative oil production of 308 MSTBO and 639 MSTBO, respectively. Your numbers are nowhere near that good.
Jim,
Thanks for your comment.
Just to be sure, you are talking about these two wells in Atascosa county?
1. API 42-013-34381, lease no. 15822, well name 4H, completion date: 2011-09-23 (according to RRC)
2. API 42-013-34407, lease no. 15799, well name 5H, completion date: 2011-11-19 (according to RRC)
On lease 15822 there are 7 horizontal wells in production, and the total is cum. production until April is 639 MBSTO, while lease 15799 has 3 producing horizontal wells, and the total cum. production until April is 308 MBSTO.
So it looks like the total production you mentioned is the same I have; however, this output was not produced by 2 wells, but by 10 and is the output for each of the leases, not for the individual wells. Does that match with your info?
Enno-
Thanks that might work. I subscribe to IHS database and some of their well numbers appear wrong. I am digging further.