North Dakota – update through March 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 15,884 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through March.

Total production

North Dakota oil production fell in March by 3% to 1.38 million bo/d (horizontal wells only).  From a production point of view, the sharply deteriorating circumstances for the oil industry were not visible yet. In the first quarter this year, 281 wells came online (vs. 216 last year).

Supply Projection dashboard

Drilling activity has sharply declined in the past 2 months; last week, 26 rigs were drilling horizontal wells, according to the Baker Hughes rig count, which is only half the level compared to 1.5 months ago. In our publicly available Supply Projection dashboard you can see that this level of drilling would only sustain a long-term production capacity of just over 1 million bo/d:

Oil supply projection in North Dakota, with no changes in rig count or productivity.

If you missed our webinar on this dashboard, you can still find a recording here: Supply Projection webinar (YouTube)

Well productivity

You can analyze how well productivity has changed in the “Well quality” overview. You will find that there were major improvements until the end of 2017, but that progress has halted since.

This can also be easily viewed in the following graph, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional):

Top operators

The overall performance of the five largest operators can be found in the “Top operators” dashboard. Hess, the number 2, was the only major operator that has set a new production record this year, at 150 thousand bo/d.

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

On Friday afternoon we will update our Supply Projection dashboard again, with the latest rig count and production numbers. In the 2nd half of next week, we will 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.