North Dakota – update through October 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 16,149 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through October.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota fell by 1% in October to just below 1.2 million bo/d, despite that more than 100 temporarily shut-in wells were brought back online. The main reason for the drop was that between May and October only 1 well was completed every day, on average, far below the level required to maintain current output (~3 wells/day).

Permitting activity

We’ve just released a new dashboard in our ShaleProfile Analytics service (Professional) in which permitting activity can be easily viewed. This chart shows the number of approved permits for horizontal wells in North Dakota by status:

Permitting activity in October (93) was the highest for this year.

The next chart, from the same dashboard, reveals which companies have been permitting the most since July this year:

Continental Resources, also the number one in terms of output, is in the lead with 56 permits approved since July.

The original dashboard also has an interactive map, so clicking e.g. on an operator will reveal the exact locations of the permitted wells.

The first feedback we got on this dashboard was rather positive:

“The permitting activity dashboard is the BOMB! Your continue to just blow me away with what SP can do!” – John Skees

Thank you John!

Supply projection

Last week there were 10 rigs drilling horizontal wells in North Dakota (according to the Baker Hughes rig count). As you can learn from our Supply Projection dashboard, at this level production will keep trending downward:

If nothing else changes (which it surely will), we project a drop to 0.5 million bo/d by the end of the decade.

Well status

In the “Well status” tab you can find that in October just over 2,100 wells were inactive (their output was 0), down from the 4,334 in May, but still quite a bit above the January level (1,582).

Top operators

The top-10 producers in the state can be found in the final tab (“Top operators”). Enerplus, the number 10, has the 4th ranking in permitting activity so far in the 2nd half of this year (see above).

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.

A steep decline is visible in some of the older vintages. We will learn in the coming months how much of that was temporary due to the adverse conditions this year.

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.