The sprawling Eagle Ford Shale has a lot going for it—great geology, close access to excellent midstream infrastructure and downstream markets, supportive landowners, and a favorable regulatory environment. But challenges lie ahead as the big unconventional play continues to evolve.

That was the message of three industry experts during a wide-ranging roundtable discussion of the play at Hart Energy’s 5th annual DUG Eagle Ford conference in San Antonio this week.

Josh Weber, senior vice president, commercial and business development for Howard Midstream Energy Partners LLC; Tim Murray, managing director for GSO Capital Partners LP; and Phil Mezey, executive vice president, Southcross Energy Partners LP; started off by recounting their first exposure to the Eagle Ford following its late-2008 discovery.

Murray recalled the Eagle Ford early-on provoked “bittersweet memories of the Austin Chalk” for him, an earlier Texas play that spurred a lot of industry excitement in the 1980s and 1990s before falling out of favor.

“That was a pretty wild pony,” he said of the Austin Chalk. “You had some very high rates that fell off very quickly. Mix that with volatile oil prices and it made for a wild ride.”

However, he added the Eagle Ford has proved to be more akin to the Niobrara, “an established basin where there are other producing horizons that are a little tired and it has brought in new excitement.”

Considering the Eagle Ford from a financial perspective, Murray added “the calculus has changed” for the play following the initial “land grab” for leases, followed now by producers’ establishment of long-term, capital-intensive development plans. “It’s been an interesting five to six years,” he said.

Mezey said he saw the Eagle Ford close up from its start. He said the firm he was with at the time, which was chasing the Austin Chalk, had acreage adjacent to the Petrohawk discovery in the fall of 2008 that started the Eagle Ford on its way. “We were already having problems getting oil out and we realized right away there were going to be some constraints” on midstream capacity. He was involved in building an initial Eagle Ford crude gathering system that was sold to NuStar Energy LP. The Petrohawk well was good but as horizontal wells got longer and fracking programs became bigger, “every well we saw was getting better and better,” he added.

Weber said he had been focused on the Fayetteville Shale when the Eagle Ford started up and didn’t become active in the South Texas unconventional play until 2011 “when it was already in full swing.” He found the booming Eagle Ford a switch from other plays he had worked.

The panelists agreed that all of those positives for the Eagle Ford have combined to make it a world-class play that now produces some 1.5 million barrels oil per day.

“It has been a great place to work,” Mezey said. “We know what the rules are and they are consistent.” That has been a contrast to plays in other states where regulation has been constraining and public support weak.

The panel also agreed that the best may be yet to come for the unconventional play. Weber pointed to the growing market for Eagle Ford gas in nearby Mexico, a promising market that now looks even better with that nation’s recent revamping of its energy law.

That demand could help open up the dry gas-prone, southern side of the formation that has seen little activity in recent years due to low gas prices. The central and northern portions of the play, typically producing more lucrative NGL-rich natural gas and crude oil, have been the scene of most Eagle Ford drilling. However, those wells typically have good associated gas production.

Development of new midstream infrastructure on the Texas Coast, in particular improvements to the Houston Ship Channel and new processing, storage and docks at Freeport and Corpus Christi, will be a plus for the growing waterborne exports. The light liquids and rich gas typical of Eagle Ford wells feed into the growing export market for NGLs and the promise of condensate exports. New condensate splitter capacity is another plus for the play, the panelists agreed.

Mezey discussed the variables that could make the Eagle Ford export market even stronger, including Mexican and Caribbean demand and the prospect of new Asian customers following completion of the Panama Canal expansion.

Exports are the key to the Eagle Ford’s future progress, Murray said. If current strict limits on crude exports remain in place, the play “could hit a brick wall a year from now with all this light crude.” Gulf Coast refineries have been geared to run heavy and sour imports and processing the Eagle Ford’s light, sweet crude and condensate isn’t economic. That production should be allowed to seek its own market, he added.

Comments