North Dakota – update through August 2020

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 16,084 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through August.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota continued to recover in August from the low in May, as it climbed to just above 1.1 million bo/d. About 700 more wells that were temporarily shut-in came back online in August, compared with almost 1,000 in the month before. Another 1,000 wells (above the March level) remain shut-in.

In the May-August time frame, only 105 wells were completed.

Supply projection

Last week there were still only 9 rigs drilling horizontal wells (according to the Baker Hughes rig count). Despite the effect from some production being brought back in the coming months, we still project that at this pace significant declines lie ahead, as you can find in our Supply Projection dashboard:

Well status

In the top chart in the “Well status” overview, you can clearly see the spike in inactive wells in May, which is now coming down.

Top operators

Continental Resources was the only operator in the top-5 that took drastic measures when the downturn started (see “Top operators”). In July and August it restarted almost all of its inactive wells, causing output to spike from 21 kbo/d in June to 174 kbo/d in August. It is again the number one producer in the state.

The number 5 in this list, WPX, just announced a merger with Devon. Only WPX has operations in the Bakken, from which it gets almost half of its output (the rest is in the Delaware Basin).

It has some pretty good wells here:

In fact, you can see that of all the major operators (>100 operated wells), its wells outperform all others; the 312 wells that WPX brought online since 2010 with at least 1 year of production history, recovered on average 173 thousand barrels of oil in the first year.

Many of its most prolific wells (69) are in the Reunion Bay field, as displayed below:

These screenshots were taken from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional).

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows how these horizontal wells are heading towards their ultimate recovery. They are grouped by the year in which production started.

Finally

Early next week we plan to 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.

Enno Peters

Enno Peters is General Manager at Novi, where he has build an AI-driven data & analytics platform tailored for oil & gas operators and energy investors. Prior to Novi, Enno founded ShaleProfile which was acquired by Novi late 2021.