Oil production in North Dakota fell by 3% in December to 1.43 million bo/d. Of the 636 thousand bo/d production capacity that was added by new wells in 2019, 89% replaced the decline from existing wells, resulting in a gain of 70 thousand bo/d y-o-y.

After 6 years of increasing well productivity, it appears that the 1,238 wells that came online last year are closely tracking the decline behavior of the 2018 vintage (“Well quality” tab). They are on a trajectory to recover 250k barrels of oil in the first 2 years, after which their production rate will have dropped from 728 bo/d (the peak rate) to just over 100 bo/d, on average.

Of the major operators, Continental Resources saw with 10% the steepest decline in output in December. It is still well ahead of Hess, the number 2 (“Top operators”).

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows how all these horizontal wells are heading towards their ultimate recovery, with wells grouped by the year in which production started.

The following dashboard, taken from ShaleProfile Analytics, shows the total oil production in the top 5 counties in North Dakota, since 2014:

Oil production in the top 5 counties in North Dakota

Output in McKenzie is twice as high as in Dunn County. Mountrail used to be the top-producing county before 2013, but it has failed to grow since the oil price collapse in 2014.

Thanks to all of you who visited our booth at NAPE last week. All the feedback and suggestions that you have given us was highly appreciated!

Early next week, we will have a new post.

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

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