North Dakota – update through January 2021

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 16,263 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through January.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota fell by 4% m-o-m, to 1.11 million bo/d in January, based on preliminary data. Just 25 new wells came online for the month, the lowest number in at least 12 years, except for May last year when the number was 17. In the past 2 months, 12 rigs were drilling horizontal wells in the state, which in our estimation is about half of what would be needed to maintain current output. However, we do see permit activity picking up (through March 4th already more permits were approved this year than in Q1 last year).

Well quality

Well performance hasn’t changed much, on average, since 2017, as can be viewed in the 3rd tab (“Well quality”).

Top operators

The final tab shows the top 10 operators in the basin. Devon Energy, which recently acquired WPX, has entered the list in the 4th spot. The other operators, except for Petro-Hunt, are well below their historical output records.

Productivity ranking

Which of these operators have the better wells? The following screenshot, taking from our Productivity Ranking dashboard, ranks all operators (with at least 10 operated wells) in North Dakota, based on the average cumulative oil recovered in the first 6 months:

The map shows the location of the wells included, colored by the same metric. You can see that Devon got some great wells with that acquisition. EOG completed few wells since 2019, but the 24 wells that it did (and produced already for 6 months) scored the best on this metric, with 191 thousand barrels of oil recovered in the first 6 months, on average.

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

Later this week we will have a new post on the Haynesville, where now most horizontal rigs are running, after 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.