United States Shale Gas Plays Map
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Eagle Ford Shale
The Eagleford Shale is a shale rock formation located in several
counties of South Texas.
As one of the fastest growing shale plays in the United States, the
Eagle Ford shale is yeilding vast amounts of Oil & Gas. With
greater amounts of oil and natural gas liquids than most shale
plays and the price of crude oil on the rise while natural gas
pricing remains stagnant in 2010 the Eagle Ford shale has become a
good investment for those producers in the play.
Located below the famous Austin Chalk formation, the Eagle Ford was
formed during the Cretaceous geologic period approximately 65 to
145 million years ago. Eagle Ford lies at a depth of between 2500
feet at the edge of the hill country to over 15,000 feet deep in
southern LaSalle, McMullen, Live Oak, Bee, DeWitt and LaVaca
counties. The area of oil and gas activity is over forty miles wide
and four hundred miles long, spanning an area from near Mexico to
East Texas. It is at the deeper or more mature end of the formation
where pressures are higher and gas volumes greater. The Eagle Ford
shale is over 330 feet thick in some areas. While the Eagle Ford
Shale has mainly been tested in a few counties located in South
Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale extends up toward Dallas County and has
an average thickness of 475 feet.
Petrohawk is credited with the discovery of the Eagle Ford shale.
At the time of this writing petrohawk controlled 350,000 net acres
in LaSalle, McMullen and De Witt counties, as well as other
prospective areas of the play, including Red Hawk, an oil prospect
located in Zavala County.
Chesapeake Energy is one of the most active players in the Eagle
Ford shale with 600,000 net oil and natural gas leasehold acres in
the Eagle Ford Shale project in South Texas.
EOG Resources has arrived and is calling theEagle Ford Shale the
biggest oil discovery in 40 years. EOG Resources has estimated over
900,000 barrels of recoverable oil in the 505,000 acres they hold
in the oil and condensate areas. As this is only a small part of
the huge play, the Eagle Ford shale may indeed hold billions of
barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural
gas.
The Eagle Ford shale is high in carbonate content, making it very
brittle and therefore able to be fractured easily with a frac job.
Porosity and permeability are greater in the Eagle Ford shale than
other shale plays. Core samples of the shale contain as much as 70%
calcite with an average clay content of eleven percent.
