Eagle Ford - Completion activity is well behind the Permian. In this post, we look at one possible cause.

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Eagle Ford - update through June 2018

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.

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This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 21,081 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008, through June.

 

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

In the first half of this year, oil production from horizontal wells has hovered just above 1.2 million bo/d, while gas output stood at about 5.8 Bcf per day.

 

Unlike the Permian, production growth is rather timid in this area. Although the ‘Well quality’ tab shows that well productivity has improved in the last couple of years, the rate of improvement is lower, and EURs are as well. That may be the reason that just ~80 rigs are drilling horizontal wells here, versus more than 400 rigs in the Permian.

 

The final tab (‘Top operators’) shows that the 2 of the 5 largest operators, EOG & ConocoPhillips are producing at or near their all-time high.

 

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

In this “Ultimate Recovery” overview the relationship between production rates, and cumulative production is revealed. Wells are grouped by the quarter in which production started.

The 538 wells that started production in Q4 2017 are so far showing the best results; they have recovered on average 162 thousand barrels of oil in their first 7 months on production.

You can see that many wells (close to 80% of the total) are now below a production rate of 50 bo/d.

 

The Eagle Ford has also a significant gas window, so the results can be quite different geographically. If you look only at the heart of the play, in Karnes and DeWitt counties, you will find significantly better results. However, here it appears that since 2014 wells are declining steeper than before, despite starting at higher initial rates. This can be seen in the following screenshot from our ShaleProfile Analytics service, in which the production profiles are shown for the wells that started producing between 2014 and 2017:

 

Normalizing for the slight increase in average lateral length over these years (or the far larger increase in proppants per foot), this effect becomes stronger.

 

Early next week I will have a post on all 10 covered US states.

Production data is subject to revisions, especially for the last few months.

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 data reports.
• FracFocus.org

 

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