Visualizing North Dakota Oil & Gas Production (Through July 2019)

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This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 15,046 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through June.

Oil production in North Dakota further increased in July, to just over 1.4 million bo/d. Gas production also set a new record, at 3 Bcf/d. Completion activity remained as high as in June, with almost 140 wells coming online.

All the production profiles of these wells are shown in the “Well quality” tab. The thickness of each curve is related to the well count of that year. From the bottom plot you can learn that since 2012, significant improvements were made in well productivity. But from 2017 onward these gains have slowed, and preliminary data shows that the 2019 performance is on par with last year.

About 35% of all these wells, or just over 5,000, are now producing at a rate below 25 bo/d (see the bottom plot in the “Well status” tab).

Of the top 5 operators, only Hess and Marathon set new output records in the last 6 months (“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.

It shows that the 163 horizontal wells that began production in 2007 have so far recovered 220 thousand barrels of oil, and they are still flowing at 23 bo/d, on average. The 972 wells that began 10 years later (2017) have each almost recovered the same amount (208 thousand bbl), but they are still flowing at an average rate of 157 bo/d.

Scott Lapierre posted an article last week on LinkedIn, in which he shared his analysis on decline rates in relationship with changing gas-to-oil ratios (GORs), for which he also used our subscription service: On the Nature and Character of the Widespread Oil Production Shortfalls.

While we don’t see the effect strongly on an aggregate basis, in several basins, including here in the Bakken we do find cases that support his view. In the past I’ve already highlighted the performance of wells and GORs in the Parshall and Sanish fields.

Today, I wanted to share this screenshot, in which we can see the performance and GORs of wells in the Banks field, which was the most productive field in North Dakota in March and April this year (over 80 thousand bo/d, higher than the Parshall or Sanish ever was), but which saw a steep decline in recent months (it’s at 60 thousand bo/d in July).

On the left you find the location of the 193 wells that began production in the years 2015-2018. The color of the well indicates the GOR in the most recent month (July). On the right the performance and GORs of these wells can be found. Note the recent increase in GOR for wells that began in 2017 & 2018. These recent wells also appear to track a similar or lower EUR than earlier wells, despite peaking far higher. It looks slightly worse once you group these wells by quarter, instead of year (possible in this dashboard).

This image was taken from our ShaleProfile Analytics service (Professional).

We now subscribe to the Premium service of the NDIC. This allows us to have slightly more accurate data for North Dakota, but it also ensures that we always have the latest production data in our subscription services.

We have started a collaboration with Lower48 Analytics, which offers a financial platform for oil & gas asset management. It will now be supported with our data platform: ShaleProfile collaborates with Lower48 Analytics, a financial platform for shale oil & gas asset management.

This Thursday September 19th, we are happy to host our first webinar, where we’ll address the topic of Terminal Decline Rates in all the major tight oil & gas basins. It will take place at 10 am CT and last about 30 minutes. Make sure to save your spot to ask all your questions!  Free registration link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/2015675976350/WN_u0et6CvlSU6eNPYphVixkg

Early next week, we will have a post on gas production in Pennsylvania, which also released July production data recently.

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