In response to my last post on US oil rig counts several people pointed me at some interesting data on Bakken (North Dakota) oil. The above graph is plotted from that data and shows the total number of producing wells and the average number of barrels/day coming from each member of that producing pool. (Note that wells could be being retired from the pool by being shut-in due to low production as well as being added by new drilling).
Overall, the conclusion I take away is that the productivity of the Bakken well population is reasonably stable and there is no sign of a drop off. These aren't very high productivity wells, but obviously it's been enough to allow the operators to make money. There's also no sign of a slowing down in the rate of wells being added. In short, no sign of an end to the boom here.
5 comments:
Have you seen this work? Bakken Oil Production, An Update
http://climateandenergynews.zparking.net/?p=733
I wondered if one could find any indication of a decline in productivity of the average well coming online in the figures you used above.
I compared the monthly rate of change of wells producing to the daily oil per well on the data, expecting it to show that the rate has to increase to maintain the daily oil per well figure, and very roughly this appears to be the case.
More wells have to be producing at peak to keep the average up.
"Overall, the conclusion I take away is that the productivity of the Bakken well population is reasonably stable and there is no sign of a drop off."
I don't think you can draw that conclusion. The number of new wells coming on line in the Bakken is going up exponentially Therefore, an increasing proportion of the total wells (new + old) are new, which skews the average production upward. What you need to do is take the average first year production of all the wells that came online in 2012, and compare this to the average first year production of all the wells that came online in 2011, and so on. Not sure if this data exists though.
I tend to agree with Stuart's conclusion. One can plot cumulative production vs. total number of wells with these data. I did that and it generates a straight line. If the new wells coming on line were less productive than the earlier wells, this plot would show a decreasing slope over time.
Frugal is entirely correct and the author has drawn the wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the data.
Here is the data
"ND Monthly Bakken Sanish Three Forks Oil Production Statistics"
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicalbakkenoilstats.pdf
If you look at the last 12 months of data, you will find that the number of wells increased by 1866 (6784 - 4918) and the production increased by 7,120,031 (from 20,131,500 to 27,251,531). This suggests increase in wells and production corresponds to 3816 barrels/well). The " BBLS Per Well" in the data for November 2013 was 4014). This can only be explained by the more recent wells being less productive than the older ones. Clearly, the drillers/frackers would pick the relatively low-hanging fruit first.
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