North Dakota – update through June 2018

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data through June from all 13,628 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production since 2005.

June oil production in North Dakota came in at 1,246 kbo/d, after a month-on-month drop of ~1.5%.

As shown in the above graph, wells that started production since 2017 contributed about half of total oil production in June.

If you switch to gas, you’ll see that natural gas production has risen strongly in North Dakota in the past 1.5 years.

In the ‘Well status’ overview the historical status of all these wells can be seen. The bottom graph there shows that in June just over 1,200 horizontal wells (9% of total) produced more than 200 bo/d, which was good for more than half of total oil production. About 60% of the wells are now at a rate below 50 bo/d.

Of the leading operators, only ConocoPhillips set a new record in June, at just below 100 thousand barrels of oil per day. Continental Resources, although still in the lead, has not drilled many additional wells in the past 1.5 years, and has now depleted its DUC count by half since March last year.

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

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

Here you can see that on average initial well performance has improved since 2015. However, you can now also find areas where it has actually fallen.

An interesting case is Oasis. If you select only this operator (in the ‘Operator’ selection), you can see that the shape of the decline has changed radically for recent wells; although they started at a high initial flow rate, after about 8 months on production the decline is steeper than seen before. It may well be that these wells will eventually recover less oil than many of its earlier wells.

Next week I plan to have a post on the Marcellus, followed by one on the Permian.

If you want to have always access to the latest data for all states, please consider our online analytics service, which was just launched. Besides being able to see all the individual horizontal wells, it also allows you to analyze trends in lateral lengths and proppant loadings. You can find more information, including the possibility to request a free trial, here on our products page.

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 30 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.