North Dakota has published their Bakken Production Data as well as North Dakota Production Data.
North Dakota production was up 12,501 bpd above February but still stands 37,531 bpd below the December high and is still 789 bpd below the January production numbers.
Barrels per day per well is dropping, 12o for Bakken wells, 99 forN.D. Total and 23 for Conventional wells.
The OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is just out with crude only production numbers for all OPEC countries for April 2015.
According to their secondary sources OPEC 12 production was up 18,000 bpd but that was after March production had been revised up 39,000 bpd.
Saudi was up 27,000 bpd. They are still 15,000 bpd below their peak in August 2013.
All rig count data is provided by Baker Hughes. All monthly charts are oil rigs only. Gas rigs are not included in the count. The last data point for all monthly charts is April 2015.
When I talk about “peaks” in this post I am only speaking of the peak since 2011 and am not suggesting that there were not higher peaks in previous years.
The International Rig Count has fallen by 150 rigs, from 1,080 in July 2014 to 930 in April 2015. This count does not include the USA, Canada or any of the FSU countries.
The European Oil Rig Count dropped from 96 in October and November to 65 in April.
What is Reserve Growth?
BP: In general, a portion of a field’s probable and possible reserves tend to get converted into proved reserves over time as operating history reduces the uncertainty around remaining recoverable reserves: an aspect of the phenomenon referred to as ‘reserves growth’.
Wiki: Experience shows that initial estimates of the size of newly discovered oil fields are usually too low. As years pass, successive estimates of the ultimate recovery of fields tend to increase. The term reserve growth refers to the typical increases in estimated ultimate recovery that occur as oil fields are developed and produced.
Basically the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission have stringent reserve booking requirements for oil companies. As a result early booked reserves of any given field is very conservative. Also, any company would much rather have reserves too low and increase them later than have them too high and have to decrease them later.
But would this not mean that fields of national oil companies, and especially fields that were discovered and developed in the Former Soviet Union have different reserve growth rates than fields developed by publically traded oil firms. The answer is yes and the USGS admits that is exactly the case.
In this publication, Reserve Growth in Oil Fields of West Siberian Basin, Russia, the USGS tells us all we need to know about Reserve growth in West Siberia.
ABSTRACT
Although reserve (or field) growth has proven to be an important factor contributing to new reserves in mature petroleum basins, it is still a poorly understood phenomenon. Although several papers have been published on the reserve growth in the U.S. fields, only limited studies are available on other petroleum provinces. This study explores the reserve growth in the 42 largest West Siberian oil fields that contain about 55 percent of the basin’s total oil reserves.
The West Siberian oil fields show a 13-fold reserve growth 20 years after the discovery year and only about a 2-fold growth after the first production year. This difference in growth is attributed to extensive exploration and field delineation activities between discovery and the first production year. Because of uncertainty in the length of evaluation time and in reported reserves during this initial period, reserve growth based on the first production year is more reliable for model development. However, reserve growth models based both on discovery year and first production year show rapid growth in the first few years and slower growth in the following years. In contrast, the reserve growth patterns for the conterminous United States and offshore Gulf of Mexico show a steady reserve increase throughout the productive lives of the fields. The different reserve booking requirements and the lack of capital investment for improved reservoir management and production technologies in West Siberian fields relative to U.S. fields are the probable causes for the difference in the growth patterns.
Four of the five largest fields in Russia are located here in West Siberia, Samotlor, Priob, Lyantor and Fedorov. 61% of Russian production currently comes from Western Siberia. Russia’s second largest field, Romashkino, discovered in 1948, is located in the Volga-Ural Basin and is also in serious decline.
Since around 2005 many countries have increased their oil production but more have decreased. But the combined production of the United States and Russia have kept the world on a slight uptrend since that time.
World oil production jumped in 2011, hardly moved at all in 2013 but it was up by more than 1.5 million barrels per day in 2014. And after such a huge gain everyone and their brother were singing “peak oil is dead’. But if you scroll down through the 37 major world oil producers it becomes obvious that a majority of nations have peaked and most of them are in steep decline.
The above chart is EIA data however the next four charts below are JODI data with the last data point February 2015. The data on all charts is thousand barrels per day.