North Dakota – update through June 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 16,521 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through June.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota from horizontal wells came in at 1.09 million bo/d in June, unchanged from the month before. Natural gas production was also steady at 2.9 Bcf/d. In the first half of this year, 271 horizontal wells were completed, versus 396 in 2020 (and 575 in 2019).

Supply projection

The horizontal rig count has doubled in North Dakota, as it did in the Lower 48, since the bottom last year. However, drilling activity had fallen steeper in North Dakota, and the current count (18 rigs according to Baker Hughes) may not be sufficient yet to keep production from dropping later this year:

This image was taken from our Supply Projection dashboard.

Well productivity

In the 3rd tab (Well quality), you can find how average well productivity has changed over time in North Dakota. You can easily filter on particular operators or counties. The bottom chart reveals that performance appears to have reached a kind of peak in the last few years.

Permit activity

The following chart displays the number of approved permits for new horizontal wells in North Dakota, by quarter and permit status, through August 12th.

Note that permit activity recovered from the low in Q2 last year through Q1 this year, but has fallen again since. With almost half of Q3 behind us, the 30 permits approved so far this quarter are not an indication that operators plan to ramp up operations in the near term.

Top operators

The final tab shows the production history and location of the top 10 operators in North Dakota. Slawson and Enerplus are the only operators on this list that set new output records in June.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on the Permian.

Subscribers to the Ultimate version of our data subscription can now also easily access our data on the Gulf of Mexico. Contact us if you would like to know more about that.

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.