North Dakota – update through February 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 15,780 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through February.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota increased slightly to 1.41 million bo/d in February, the month before the dramatic decline in oil prices. In the first 2 months of the year, 177 new wells came online, the highest number in the past 4 years.

Supply Projection dashboard

Although the horizontal rig count in North Dakota fell last week to 41 (from 51 in Jan/Feb), this is still sufficient to maintain a long-term output of about 1.4 million bo/d (assuming no changes in rig/well productivity), which you can find in our new Supply Projection dashboard. We have made this dashboard publicly available here since last week.

Well productivity

Since 2018, initial well productivity has remained unchanged, as is clearly displayed in the bottom chart within the “Well quality” overview.

Well status

In the “Well status” tab, the status of all these wells can be seen. The bottom chart shows that in February over 60% of the horizontal wells in North Dakota produced less than 50 bo/d, which at current prices is in most cases probably uneconomical on an operating basis.

Whiting Petroleum

Whiting Petroleum, which for several years was the largest operator in the Bakken, filed for bankruptcy on April 1st. In February, it still produced more than 100 thousand bo/d in North Dakota (see “Top operators”). It drilled its best wells in the years 2008-2010, with the development of the Sanish field, as you can see in this image from ShaleProfile Analytics:

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 quarter in which production started.

Finally

[Update: The Oklahoma post is delayed with 2-3 weeks] We will have a new post on Pennsylvania early next week. We also plan to do a webinar on the Supply Projection dashboard next week (probably Thursday at 9 am CT) – stay tuned!

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.