North Dakota – update through July 2022

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 17,375 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2001 onward, through July.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota from horizontal wells fell m-o-m by about 2.5% in July, to 1.02 million b/d, while natural gas output increased to over 3 Bcf/d. Through July, 331 horizontal wells began production this year, only 4 more than in the same time frame last year (327). These numbers are not enough to sustain current output, which is why total oil production is now below where it was 8 years ago when North Dakota first crossed the 1 million bbl/d milestone.

Supply projection

As of last week, 37 rigs are drilling horizontal wells (according to Baker Hughes). Assuming that well productivity can be maintained, this should be a sufficiently high level for some growth in output in the coming months. From our Supply Projection dashboard:

Well productivity

But can well productivity be maintained?

In the “Well quality” tab, the performance of all horizontal wells can be viewed. The bottom chart there already reveals that results have stagnated in the last few years. You can also see this in the following dashboard, where we take a closer look at how well returns, as measured by the cumulative oil recovered in the 1st year, has changed in each of the 4 core counties of the Bakken:

As you can see in the red circle, results in the last 4 years are in general between 150 and 200 thousand barrels of oil during the 1st year. Completion designs also have not changed much during this time (see the bottom 2 charts for the average lateral length and proppant loading in the same time frame).

Lease maps

One of the recent data items we have added in the past year to our data platform, besides vertical well data, landing zones and subsurface rock properties are detailed lease maps, which we gather and extract from public documents such as investor presentations. Here you can see our current coverage within the Bakken:

Permit activity

One other dimension we can look at when analyzing activity levels is how many permits for new horizontal wells have been approved. Here we can also see that activity is slowly ramping up again:

Finally

Our next post will probably be about the Haynesville again, and is expected in 2 weeks.

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 individuals 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 as “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in the past month is designated as “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.