Visualizing Eagle Ford Oil & Gas Production (Through February 2020)

[shaleprofile + 242]

This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 24,411 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through February 2020.

Total production

February oil production fell by 1%  m-o-m, to just over 1.3 million bo/d. Although natural gas production fell by a similar amount to 6.5 Bcf/d, it has held up better over the years, due to lower decline rates (toggle “product” to gas to see this).

Supply Projection dashboard

As of last week, the horizontal rig count in this basin has fallen to just 26, down from 94 in February last year, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. If (hypothetically) such a level of drilling and completion would be sustained, oil production in this basin would fall over time to just 0.7 million bo/d, or about half the current output. You can see this in our publicly available Supply projection dashboard, if you only select this basin:

Tight oil supply outlook for the Eagle Ford with 26 active horizontal rigs.

This does not consider the extra shut-ins or that completion activity is even lower and therefore the near-term drop will be far larger.

Well productivity

On average, well performance has not improved in the last 3 years as you’ll find in the bottom chart of the “Well quality” tab. Only selecting the oil wells (possible in our subscription services) shows a similar result:

Well productivity in the Eagle Ford – horizontal oil wells only

As you can see, newer wells recover just shy of 190 thousand barrels of oil in the first 3 years on production, on average. This is probably more than 2/3rds of their oil EUR. Declines are steeper than in the other 2 major tight oil basins (Bakken & Permian) and in February 75% of all these horizontal oil wells (16.500) were below a production rate of 50 bo/d.

Top operators

The top 10 operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG, the clear number 1, was good for 20% of total oil production in the basin.

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.

Finally

Early next week we will have a new post on Pennsylvania, which released March production data a few days ago (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

Visit our blog to read the full post and use the interactive dashboards to gain more insight: https://bit.ly/3eaCkU5

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[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

What the heck is a “horizontal rig’???

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

34 minutes ago, Douglas Buckland said:

What the heck is a “horizontal rig’???

Perhaps related to a "horizontal bop"

 

(Clearly, I'm joking ...)

[Mike Shellman + 548]

44 minutes ago, Douglas Buckland said:

What the heck is a “horizontal rig’???

Good morning Texas time, Douglas. I am privileged to have worked with Enno to develop his amazing analytical tools and oilprice.com is fortunate he is willing to share his blog posts. The data he presents is straight from regulatory agencies in which oil and gas production reports are filed; there is no bias whatsoever in his data, though a lot of shale oil cheerleaders often try and paint it as such because reality never jives up with the bullshit and they struggle with acceptance of that. With the ability to add and subtract it can often, almost always, be very damning to investor presentations once one uses actual realized production data. 

We, rather Enno, need to differentiate between horizontal rig count and vertical rig count for obvious reasons so the term horizontal rig is simply nomenclature. For those wanting to track rig efficiencies, or well productivity per rig (?) or what the rig count might mean for future LTO predictions we don't want vertical rigs drilling vertical wells skewing the data. You and I both know there is no such thing as a "horizontal rig." Having said that, there is definitely a new generation of rigs designed specifically for drilling unconventional shale, complete with specific top drive specifications, lay down machines, pump yards, how they handle solids and the ability to walk from one lousy well to the next lousy well, etc.

Take care, mate.

  

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

Good one Mike!