Eagle Ford – update through November 2022 | November oil production in the Eagle Ford did not increase y-o-y.

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This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from all 28,217 horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford region, that have started producing from 2008 onward, through November.

Total production

Tight oil production in the Eagle Ford came in at just below 1.1 million b/d in November 2022, basically unchanged compared with a year earlier. As production for about 2-3% of the wells has not yet been reported for November, the chart above shows a lower figure. Natural gas production did rise by about 10% from a year earlier to well above 6 Bcf/d (switch product to ‘gas’ to see the increase).

Drilling Activity

Drilling activity has remained unchanged since June last year; last week 79 rigs were drilling horizontal wells (source: Baker Hughes):

The horizontal rig count in the Eagle Ford (left hand side), colored by subbasin and WTI (black curve, right hand axis)

Well performance

In this recent WSJ article it was noted that well productivity has fallen in the Permian (behind paywall): U.S. Shale Boom Shows Signs of Peaking as Big Oil Wells Disappear

In the Eagle Ford we can see that trend has already been longer active:

Well performance and completion details in the Eagle Ford, as measured by the cum. oil recovered in the first 6 months, per 10k ft of lateral length, by subbasin. Horizontal oil wells since 2011 only.

In the top chart you can find that on a normalized basis (normalizing productivity for differences in lateral length), we see that recent well results in the core part of the basin, the Central Eagle Ford, are now lower than 7 years ago, and 30% below the peak in 2017.

Operator productivity ranking

In the next graph we’ll take a closer look at the performance of all the major unconventional operators in the Eagle Ford in recent years.

Ranking of all major operators in the Eagle Ford by recent well results, as measured by the average cum. oil in the first 6 months. Horizontal oil wells since 2020 only. The thickness indicates the relative well count. The map displays all included wells, colored by the same metric (red is better).

ConocoPhillips shows the best performance in recent years; its 331 horizontal oil wells that were completed since 2020 have recovered on average 135 thousand barrels of oil during the first 6 months.

Top operators

The output and well locations of the 10 largest operators in the basin are displayed in the final tab. EOG’s production last November was close to its lowest output in almost a decade.

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

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