Visualizing Eagle Ford oil & gas production (through October)

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Eagle Ford - update through October 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 21,912 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that started producing since 2008, through October.

Visit ShaleProfile blog to explore the full interactive dashboards

Oil production increased slightly in the Eagle Ford in 2018, as operators completed ~10% more wells than in 2017, based on preliminary data. Once revision data is in, I expect that October production will be close to 1.3 million bo/d. Gas production from these wells is good for almost 6 Bcf/d (toggle ‘Product’ to gas to see this).

 

Average initial well productivity almost didn’t change year-over-year compared with the year before, as you’ll see in the ‘Well quality’ tab. If you click there on 2018 in the legend, you’ll note that so far the wells that started last year are closely tracking the performance of the 2017 wells.

Although newer wells are peaking at more than double the rate than wells that started in 2011/2012, they are also declining faster. I expect that after 2-3 years on production, they have declined to a very similar production rate as those earlier wells had at that age. That becomes especially apparent if you select for example just the wells from 2012 and 2016 (keep the ‘Ctrl’ key in when selecting both of these years), and if you change the axis to a linear scale. I’ll show you more about these decline rates later in this post.

 

Of the top 5 operators in the Eagle Ford, only the 2 largest (EOG & ConocoPhillips) set new production records in September.

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. I’ve preselected the Austin Chalk and Eagle Ford formations.

As I showed last week for the DJ Basin, also here you can see that the decline steepens once wells have reached low levels of production.

How large are the decline rates here? To answer this question, I again used our new ‘Terminal decline’ dashboard from our Professional Analytics service. See here the result:

 

 

 

What this shows is the performance of all horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford, that started production between 2011 and 2014. Only wells are selected that have produced predominantly oil, and which fell below a production rate of 60 bo/d not later than Nov 2015 (this ensures that we have at least 36 months of data for all wells), from which they never recovered.

There were 5,628 such wells, from in total 11,554 horizontal oil wells that started in the Eagle Ford in those 4 years.

The top chart shows the oil production rate (logarithmic scale) of these wells, by the month since they fell below 60 bo/d. The wells are grouped by the year in which they started.

The bottom chart shows the average annual decline of all these wells. Three observations:

1. After annual decline rates have slightly stabilized (after month 26 or so), you can see that the annual decline is close to, or above 20%.
2. Each year, the annual decline rate is higher. Some of this is expected, as younger wells are in an earlier part of their decline curve, where the decline is steeper. But even if you correct for that (eg. by comparing the performance of 2 consecutive vintages shifted by 12 months), the decline rates of younger wells are higher. In particular, the wells from 2014 never really go below 25% annual decline.
3. Once wells reach a very low production rate (~10 bo/d), the decline rate accelerates again.

 

A special thank you to Mike Shellman for sharing a wealth of articles and oilfield knowledge regarding this topic.

Next week we are at the NAPE summit in Houston, so if you happen to be there, please come visit our booth (#2331). We also still have time available earlier in the week for 1-on-1 meetings in Houston, so please contact us if you would like to take a bit more time understanding how we might help you.

 

Tomorrow at 10:30 (EST) we’ll also cover the Eagle Ford in our enelyst chat.

Later this week, or early next week, there will be a new update on the Permian Basin.

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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