Tag: Bakken

Bakken, North Dakota & Production by County

Ron Patterson 166 Comments

North Dakota published their Bakken Production Data yesterday along with their North Dakota Production Data. This all happened the same day the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report came out. This has resulted in two post in two days.

All charts below are in barrels per day with the last data point May 2014 even though the horizontal axis may only go through April 2014.

What type of chart is preferable to most folks, the below type?

Bakken Stacked

Or this type?

Bakken Barrels Per Day

This was a good month for the Bakken. Production was  up 36,653 bp/d to 974,695 bp/d. All North Dakota was up 36,379 bp/d to 1,039,635 bp/d. This meant that North Dakota production outside the Bakken was down 274 bp/d to 64,940 bp/d.

From the Director’s Cut, bold mine:

The drilling rig count was up slightly from April to May, and from May to June the rig
count increased by one. The number of well completions increased 14% to 227, but weather continued to impact activity in May with 2 days of heavy rain near Dickinson and 5 to 6 days with wind speeds in excess of 35 mph (too high for completion work).

At the end of May there were about 610 wells waiting on completion services, an
increase of 10.
Read More

North Dakota and the Bakken by County

Ron Patterson 167 Comments

Looking at North Dakota oil production by county, and historical production by county, gives a better  perspective of what is happening in the Bakken and the rest of North Dakota than just looking at total production.

The data is available here: ND Historical Barrels of Oil Produced by County You will notice it says:(Confidential Wells are Not Included). However the total North Dakota does include confidential wells. And I have made adjustments for the confidential wells. The adjustment for March and April came from the NDIC here: State Summary Report April 2014.
Bakken Counties

The above chart is after adjustment for confidential wells. Even the lowest producer of the big four, Dunn County, outproduces the rest of North Dakota combined.

McKenzie

McKenzie was up 7,168 barrels per day after adjustment this month.
Read More

Oil Field Models, Decline Rates and Convolution

D Coyne 188 Comments

This post is by Dennis Coyne

The eventual peak and decline of light tight oil (LTO) output in the Bakken/ Three Forks play of North Dakota and Montana and the Eagle Ford play of Texas are topics of much conversation at the Peak Oil Barrel and elsewhere.

The decline rates of individual wells are very steep, especially early in the life of the well (as much as 75% in the first year for the average Eagle Ford well), though the decline rates become lower over time and eventually stabilize at around 6 to 7% per year in the Bakken.

What is not obvious is that for the entire field (or play), the decline rates are not as steep as the decline rate for individual wells. I will present a couple of simple model to illustrate this concept.

Much of the presentation is a review of ideas that I have learned from Rune Likvern and Paul Pukite (aka Webhubbletelescope), though any errors in the analysis are mine.

A key idea underlying the analysis is that of convolution. I will attempt an explanation of the concept which many people find difficult.

At Wikipedia there is a fairly mathematical presentation of the concepts which often confuses people.  There are a couple of nice visuals to convey the concept as well see this page.

In the visual below a function f (in blue) is convolved with a function g (in red) to produce a third function (in black) which we could call h where h=f*g and the asterisk represents convolution, just as a + symbol is used to represent addition.

Convolution of box signal with itself2.gif
“Convolution of box signal with itself2” by Convolution_of_box_signal_with_itself.gif: Brian Amberg
derivative work: Tinos (talk) – Convolution_of_box_signal_with_itself.gif. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I think the best way to present convolution is with pictures. Chart A below shows a relationship between oil output (in barrels per month) and months from the first oil output for the average well in an unspecified LTO play.

This relationship is a simple hyperbola of the form q=a/(1+kt), where a and k are constants of 13,000 and 0.25 respectively, t is time in months, and q is oil output.

Chart A is often referred to as a well profile. The values for the constants were chosen to make the well profile fairly similar to an Eagle Ford average well profile. EUR30 is the estimated ultimate recovery from this average well over a 30 year well life.

blog140617/
Read More

Texas RRC Report April Production Data

Ron Patterson 130 Comments

The Texas Rail Road Comission has released their latest report with oil, gas and condensate production for April. The RRC data is always incomplete however and takes many months for the all the data to trickle in. The below chart shows that problem.

Texas RRC-EIA

The data is barrels per data with the EIA data through March and RRC data through April. The EIA has Texas C+C data is highly linear for the 10 months June 2013 through March 2014, increasing at 48 kb/d for 4 months, 41 kb/d for one month then 49 kb/d for the last 5 months.

The EIA has Texas C+C increasing at an average of 48.6 bp/d each month for the last two years. I think that is a little high. I think the production has been increasing at close to 43 kb/d each month but with a recent slow down in that increase.

Texas C+C

All Texas RRC June report data is through April. The RRC does not combine Crude with Condensate so I have to add the two. But here you can see the problem. Each month the reported data increases with the latest months showing the largest increase. However even if this is the case, the latest month should show an increase almost equal to the final total increase for that month. That was the case in the April Report, (January to February), but not the case for the last two reports.
Read More