Eagle Ford – update through March 2020

• By: Enno Peters
• Published: Jun 30, 2020

 
 

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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 24,771 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through March 2020.

Total production

March oil production hovered at around 1.34 million bo/d, the same level as since the start of the year (after upcoming revisions). As is shown by the colored areas in the chart above, over half of production in March came from wells that started producing since 2019.

Supply Projection dashboard

As of last week, the horizontal rig count in this basin has fallen to just 15, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. This is 50% lower than the previous low in May 2016. If drilling and completion activity would stay at such a level, production in this basin would fall below 800k bo/d by the end of next year, as one can simulate in our publicly available Supply projection dashboard:

Well productivity

Declines are quite steep relative to the Permian and the Bakken. On average, wells decline to a rate close to 20 bo/d after 6 years on production, as you can find in the “Well quality” tab. This is also the case if you exclude gas wells, which is a subscription-only feature. Furthermore, the bottom chart in that dashboard reveals that well results basically remained unchanged since 2017.

Top operators

The 5 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. Chesapeake, which just set a production record in March at 176 thousand bo/d, filed for bankruptcy protection this week. It operates almost over 2,600 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford, but it also has been unable to improve well performance since 2017:

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. Extrapolating these curves allows you to see that newer wells are on a trajectory to recover just shy of 250 thousand barrels of oil, before they have hit a rate of 10 bo/d, which is probably already below the economic limit in the current pricing environment.

Finally

Early next week we will have a new post on all covered states in the US. We will also release a report on the major gas basins this week, which includes production data through March. Ohio, which also just released Q1 production data, will be covered in it as well.

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.

Enno Peters

Background in AI, worked on developing Supply Chain Planning & Optimization solutions for Quintiq, setting up its business in China. Focus on company direction and the technical development of ShaleProfile’s platform.