Mark Twain would appreciate irony in the Eagle Ford Shale, where rumors of the play’s impending exhaustion are greatly exaggerated. The Eagle Ford has produced 2.5 billion barrels (Bbbl) of oil and will generate another 2.1 Bbbl, according to Allen Gilmer, CEO of DrillingInfo, the Austin-based Big Data repository of all things oil and gas. The play has also produced 10 Tcf of natural gas and is on track to produce another 5 Tcf to 6 Tcf. DrillingInfo compiles datapoints on rock quality, drilling parameters and completion techniques. Internally, the company correlates well metric variables to rock quality in an attempt to determine which aspects of rock quality drive are producible. The company has classified 10 grades of rock across the play, which stretches from the Mexican border east and north to the area around Bryan/College Station, Texas. “The reason we did this—and it’s not perfect; there is no […]