Ziff Energy Launches Eagle Ford Benchmarking Study
Ziff Energy will conduct a comprehensive study on the Eagle Ford shale region, the company’s first such study related to a shale. Though the “Eagle Ford Shale Production Operations Benchmarking Study,” the firm’s consultants will analyze operating costs and uptime reliability for production operations in the South Texas shale basin.
“While Ziff Energy has been benchmarking production operations in the U.S. since 1996, this will be Ziff’s first production operations benchmarking study for a shale basin,” said Richard M. Tucker, vice president of marketing and client relations at Ziff Energy. “The level of interest to assess performance in the basin is very high, supported by the fact that many of the top basin operators are participating.”
Upon completion of the study, Ziff Energy will conduct a workshop for study participants on the best operating practices in the region.
“This study is a critical tool for Eagle Ford operators to manage continuous improvement initiatives by identifying cost performance gaps and opportunities to improve production efficiency,” says Sergey Turchin, director of operations consulting at Ziff Energy and the project manager for this study. “Participating operators will gain insight into how to best deploy their limited resources to improve their production operations.”
Petrohawk Energy Corp., now part of BHP Billiton, drilled the first wells to produce oil and gas from the Eagle Ford shale in 2008. Oil companies quickly extended the play from the Texas-Mexico border in Webb and Maverick counties 400 miles toward eastern Texas. The basin is 50 miles wide with an average thickness of 250 ft at a depth of between 4,000 and 12,000 ft. The shale is brittle with a much higher carbonate percentage, making it easier to use hydraulic fracturing to produce the oil or gas.
The oil reserves are estimated at 3 billion barrels. In the first 6 months of 2013, the Eagle Ford formation produced 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil and condensate, as well as 2.7 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas. This oil production represents a 50 percent increase from the 2012 average. By the end of 2013, production skyrocketed to more than 1 million bpd of oil. Production from the Eagle Ford formation will increase in 2014 as oil and gas operators invest close to $30 billion to unearth more crude oil and liquids.
Ziff Energy is a division of HSB Solomon Associates LLC.
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