North Dakota – update through June 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 16,046 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through June.

Total production

North Dakota oil production rose by 30 thousand bo/d in June to just shy of 0.9 million bo/d, after 2 months of steep declines. Despite the uptick in output, this was still half a million bo/d below the level at the start of the year.

More than 4,100 horizontal wells were not producing any oil in June. Only 4 operators brought wells online (37) during the month, Hess (17), Oasis (9), Crescent Point (6) and Exxon Mobil (5).

Top operators

Of the 5 major operators, Continental Resources responded the most drastically, as it shut in most of its production (“Top operators”). In June, it produced 21 kbo/d, down by almost 90% from its March level (197 kbo/). ConocoPhillips dropped out of this list, as it also curtailed its production significantly.

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.

These curves are now clearly impacted by the extra shut-ins in the April-June period.

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.