Eagle Ford – update through December 2020

By: Enno Peters
Published: Mar 24, 2021

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 25,374 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through December 2020.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford fell by 2-3% in December to about 1.05 million bo/d (after upcoming revisions). The ~1,030 wells that came online last year were only able to replace half of the 600 thousand bo/d base decline. In the previous 2 years, with more than 2,000 wells completed each year, output in the basin was still growing.

Supply Projection

As of last week, 35 rigs are drilling horizontal wells here (source: Baker Hughes). Using our Supply Projection dashboard, you can find that at this level more declines are on the horizon.

We estimate that with the current level of well & rig productivity, about 50 rigs are needed to sustain current output.

Well productivity

In the ‘Well quality’ tab, the production profiles of all the horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford can be found. The bottom chart makes clear that well productivity, after many years of increases, did not improve anymore after 2017. This still holds if you exclude gas wells, and especially if you normalize for lateral length, both of which are possible in our subscription service.

EOG, the largest operator, saw already some decline in well results in 2019:

Actual and forecasted well performance for EOG in the Eagle Ford. Horizontal oil wells since 2013 only.

In the chart on the right side, you can see the cumulative production profiles for almost all EOG’s wells in this area, with a production start between 2013 and 2019. Note that the wells that began in 2019 on average will produce just below 300 thousand barrels of oil after 20 years, vs. almost 350 thousand barrels for the wells that began a year earlier.

We automatically create these 20-year production forecasts for all the wells in our platform, for both the oil & the gas stream, as long as they have sufficient production history. Ultimate subscribers can use these forecasts, together with real-time pricing information from the CME, to quickly run well economics on 100s or 1,000s of wells, based on their own assumptions on well costs and other expenses.

In which counties can you find the most productivity wells?

Ranking of counties in the Eagle Ford by well performance. Horizontal oil wells since 2017 only.

In the dashboard above, you will find all horizontal oil wells in the Eagle Ford, that began production after 2016. The chart ranks all counties by the performance of their wells, as measured by the average cumulative oil recovered in the first 12 months. DeWitt County scores the best, with almost 180 thousand barrels of oil recovered in the first year, on average (~500 wells), followed by Karnes with close to 160 thousand barrels on the same metric. This dashboard also allows you to rank on other dimensions (e.g. operator, formation, or basin).

Top operators

The 8 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. All, except Callon, are at a multi-year low.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on gas production in Pennsylvania, which just released data for January (already available in our subscription services).

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.