North Dakota – update until August 2016

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

Total oil production in North Dakota decreased by 49 kbo/d to 981 kbo/d in August, after an increase of 3 kbo/d in the previous month. As usual, I only show the production from horizontal wells, and because conventional production is just 30 kbo/d in North Dakota, the total production shown here is a little lower than this official number.

A brief look at the new data revealed the following:

• Last month I mentioned an incredibly good performance of wells that started in June. They still did well, but the drop in their performance from the previous month was large as well. It may have been a bit of an exceptional performance, given that the average well in July or August did not come close so far. You can see this in the “Well quality” tab, if you use the filter to only show wells since 2015, and show the wells by “Month of first flow”.
• August had 66 new wells on production, vs 47 in July.
• Growth in production from new wells (<3 months) was relatively low, while declines in older wells were higher across the board, which resulted in the larger than typical drop in total production.

I have not decided yet on the date of a new post, but will update the text here once I’ve done so.

For those of you who had a look at how to obtain the data, and failed to download the sample data: the download link has been restored. Please let me know if you have any questions.

For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• DMR of North Dakota

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentation has 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, and include or exclude categories.
• 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.