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

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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 24,771 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:

Chesapeake’s well performance in the Eagle Ford (horizontal wells since 2011 only)

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

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