Is oil production in the Eagle Ford finally recovering? 🤔

[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 the blog to explore the full interactive dashboard

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 27,476 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through July.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford has hovered at around 1.05 million b/d since the start of this year, near the lowest levels in 9 years, and came in at just above 1 million in July (there will still be some minor upward revisions). If you switch product to ‘gas’, you’ll see that the picture for natural gas is rather different, and that it has been increasing in the last 2 years to just over 6 Bcf/d.

Drilling Activity

Drilling activity has greatly increased from the lows in 2020, but with 78 rigs drilling horizontal wells (source: Baker Hughes) of which 73 focused on oil, activity is unchanged in the last 5 months:

 

The horizontal rig count in the Eagle Ford and WTI (black line, right hand axis)

Well performance

Next, we’ll take a closer look at productivity trends in the basin. In the 3rd tab of the interactive presentation above, you will find the production profiles of all wells in the main Eagle Ford formations. So far it is clear that the wells that came online in 2021 are performing slightly better than in earlier years, but it also appears that the wells that began this year are lagging behind.

On a normalized basis (normalizing productivity for differences in lateral length), we find that well results have stagnated in the last 6 years, with the horizontal wells starting this year so far under-performing the average in this time frame:

Well performance of all wells in the Eagle Ford, as measured by the cum. oil recovered in the first 6 months, per 1k ft of lateral length. Horizontal oil wells since 2011 only.

 

Well status

In the 4th tab of the interactive presentation, you will find that over 40% of the 27k horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford now produce less than 10 b/d

Top operators

The output and well locations of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. Oil production of the 4 largest producers in the basin, EOG Resources, ConocoPhillips, Marathon, and Chesapeake has steadily fallen over the years. The increase for Devon in June was driven by its acquisition of Validus Energy.

Finally

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/3UKSBoB