Enno Peters
This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here
These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 16,427 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through April.
Total production
Oil production in North Dakota from horizontal wells rose by 1% in April, m-o-m, to 1.08 million bo/d. Natural gas production has hovered just below 3.0 Bcf/d since October. Only 177 horizontal wells began production in the first 4 months of this year, the lowest in over a decade.
Supply projection
Just 15 rigs were drilling horizontal wells last week (source: Baker Hughes), which is 1/10th the number that were active here 10 years ago (even though output is quite a bit higher!). Our outlook based on this number can be viewed in our Supply Projection dashboard:
Well productivity
Well performance is basically unchanged since 2018, as you can see in the bottom chart of the “Well quality” tab.
That coincides with the moment that lateral lengths and proppant loadings stopped increasing, on average:
Although we typically use averages, it’s also interesting to analyze how the best wells are performing. In the following chart, from our Productivity Ranking dashboard, you can see all the horizontal wells in North Dakota that came online since 2008 ranked by their cumulative oil recovery in the first 2 years on production:
We find exactly 10 horizontal wells that recovered over 600 thousand barrels in their first 2 years online. They are selected and their locations are shown on the map.
The Whitman 2-34H scored the best on this metric, with 835 thousand barrels recovered in just 2 years. This Middle Bakken well was completed in September 2011 by Continental Resources in Dunn County, and it peaked at 1,697 bo/d. It has now produced almost 1.8 million barrels.
Permit activity
Permit activity has fallen again this quarter; through June 9th only 87 new permits were approved in the 2n quarter this year:
Most new permits this quarter were filed by Hess (15) and Continental Resources (12).
Top operators
The final tab shows the top 10 operators in the basin. Slawson, Petro-hunt and Enerplus (through its acquisition of Bruin) were the only operators that were at or near record production in April.
Finally
We just published a new report on the latest developments in the major US tight oil basins, which is freely available here: ShaleProfile Insights June 2021
Next week we will have a new post on the Permian.
Sources
For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:
- DMR of North Dakota. These presentations only show the production from horizontal wells; a small amount (about 40 kbo/d) is produced from conventional vertical wells.
- FracFocus.org
Brief manual
The above presentations have many interactive features:
- You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.
- Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items. You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.
- Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.
- You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.
- By clicking on the legend you can highlight selected items.
- Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.
- The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.
- If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
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