Enno Peters
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 16,012 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through May.
Total production
North Dakota oil production fell by 350 thousand bo/d in May to 0.85 million bo/d, an even larger decline than we saw in the previous month (200 kbo/d). The last time the state produced this much was 7 years ago.
About 5,000 horizontal wells did not produce any oil in May (a figure normally closer to 2,000). This image, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics (Professional), shows the location of all completed horizontal wells in North Dakota. They are colored by their oil production rate in May.
It clearly shows that huge areas were shut-in.
Directional surveys
We have made further progress on our mapping capabilities. For the states for which we have directional surveys (North Dakota, Colorado and most of Texas), the exact position of the wells are now shown on our maps.
See here for example the layout of 318 wells in the Reunion Bay field (ND), which is operated by Marathon and WPX:
The location and performance of 318 horizontal wells in Reunion Bay field
The surface locations are easily marked and the wells are colored from their Landing Point onward.
Directional survey data is now also part of our ShaleProfile Data service.
Top operators
Continental Resources and ConocoPhillips were the only 2 operators in the top 5 which decided to shut in the majority of their wells in May, as you’ll find the last tab. By not doing so, Hess became the largest operator in May, with an output of almost 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. You can already see that the profiles start tipping downward, due to the extra shut-ins. This is more clearly visible if you group the data by quarter or month.
Well status map
In the well status map dashboard (the 3rd tab) you can easily find the locations where operators have shut-in wells (click on the “Inactive” status in the color legend to highlight those areas).
Finally
Early next week we plan to have a new post on the Permian. We’re currently developing well spacing and well economics modules for our online analytics service, about which I will soon be able to share more with you!
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.
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4 Comments
Thank you for including the maps! Are you able to estimate how many locations remain in ND? Looks mostly drilled up, but there are multiple benches in some areas.
Shallow Sand,
Great to hear you liked the new maps!
Regarding your question; not yet, but with the well spacing dashboards that we are now developing it is quite easy to get an idea on how the relationship between well spacing and EUR. That helps in answering the question what the right spacing may be and therefore what could be left.
Hi Enno,
The word ‘devastating’ pops up looking at this graph.
Do you have any idea if a fracked well can be switched on and of like a light bulb without further consequences, or does time reduce the pressure. The latter would mean a (partially) permanent loss of production.
Bruno,
I have seen some discussions about this issue. As far as I am aware, there is no firm conclusion on this, so this will be an interesting experiment from that point of view.