Eagle Ford – update through August 2020

By: Enno Peters
Published: Nov 23, 2020

Icon This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 25,078 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through August 2020.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford made a small additional recovery in August, to about 1.1 million bo/d. This was still almost 20% lower than at the start of the year when output was close to 1.4 million bo/d.

Supply Projection dashboard

The horizontal rig count has started to recover in the past 3 months, from the low of 10 rigs at the end of August, to 24 as of last week (according to the Baker Hughes rig count). But much more is needed to stem the underlying decline, as can be seen in our Supply projection dashboard after selecting this basin:

Tight oil outlook for the Eagle Ford at current drilling levels and productivity.

Using the interactive model, you will find that about 60 rigs would be needed to keep production at 1 million b/d, assuming no changes in productivity.

Top operators

The 12 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. Chesapeake and ConocoPhillips, the numbers 2 & 3 in the basin, brought some production back online, while EOG, the largest producer in the basin, saw a small drop in output.

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview reveals the relationship between production rates and cumulative production. Wells are grouped and averaged by the year in which production started.

No productivity gains have been made in the basin since 2017, on average.

Finally

For 95%+ of all the horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford, production data is already available through September in our subscription services.

Later this week we will have a post on gas production in Pennsylvania, which already released September production last week.

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.