Bakken – Page 29 – Peak Oil Barrel

The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report, Ghana and China

03/10/201403/10/2014 Ron Patterson 59 Comments

The EIA’s latest Drilling Productivity Report has been published. I found some strange things in the report. For the Bakken, their data does not jive with that posted by North Dakota. I have plotted the two together. The North Dakota includes all North Dakota but not the Montana part of the Bakken. The EIA data includes all the Bakken but not the non-Bakken part of North Dakota. Almost a wash but not quite. Montana produces slightly more than the non-Bakken part of North Dakota, but not very much. Anyway…

I thought for sure that the EIA would hear that Bakken Production was down about 50,000 barrels per day in December. But Nooooo… they have the Bakken up by over 20,000 barrels per day in December, a difference of 70,000 bp/d. But up until the last two or three months they follow the North Dakota data pretty close so we can hope they update their data in a few months.

However all LTO production was revised upward in this last report. The chart below is the barrels per day that all tight oil was revised upward.

Doesn’t the strange shape of that chart raise suspicions? December production was revised upward by 34,672 bp/d when it actually should have been revised downward by perhaps twice that amount. January production was revised upward by 35,243 barrels per day. I doubt very much that this was the actual case.

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EIA’s Petroleum Supply Monthly by State, Texas Reporting Problems

02/28/201402/28/2014 Ron Patterson 319 Comments

The EIA releases two monthly petroleum data sets for US oil production. The Monthly Energy Review which gives the US production and consumption of all forms of energy, oil, natural gas, coal and electricity. The other, the Petroleum Supply Monthly deals only with petroleum but gives every possible statistic, production, refining, export and import from every state and district.

Concerning total US crude oil production the two should agree but they don’t. From December 2011 back they have the exact same production numbers but the near months differ greatly. I have found that the latter, the Petroleum Supply Monthly is the most accurate. The Monthly Energy Review usually changes their numbers to match the Petroleum Supply Monthly but both revise their numbers as more accurate numbers come in. They both are published the last week of the month but the M.E.R is always a month ahead with their data.

Here are their the numbers in KB/d and the difference between the two.

Notice that the former had US production up by 333 kb/d in December while the latter had US production down by 77 kb/d in December. But both will be revised to match what each state or pad reports later on.

There is no uniform reporting strategy among different states. They all appear to do it differently and on a different time frame. For instance the PSM, which is the only one of the two that reports state by state production number, reports the exact same numbers for North Dakota that we get from North Dakota. But they get their Texas data from the Texas Rail Road Commission. And the Texas RRC is very delinquent with their reporting. They just report the numbers as they come in from the field and every month they change as more numbers come in, sometimes taking many months until all the numbers are in. So the EIA just guesses at Texas production numbers.

Texas and North Dakota daily C+C production in KB/D. The last data point is December 2013.

Notice the last nine months are extremely linear. In fact each month, April through December, Texas monthly crude production increased by exactly 50,000 barrels per day.
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When Will Peak Oil Actually Arrive? Costs Way Too High and Rising

02/25/201402/25/2014 Ron Patterson 210 Comments

When will Peak Oil actually arrive? There has been considerable debate on that point recently. Well if you are talking about “Conventional Crude Oil” it arrived in 2005. But in many cases unconventional crude oil works just as well so I think we must count that. I will comment on that at the end of this post below.

The chart below is kb/d with the last data point, 2013, is the average through October.

Averaging the first 10 months of 2013, World oil production was up only 66,000 barrels per day. And without the US LTO input, world production would have been down 807,000 barrels per day, lower than the 2005 level.

And it is all about LTO, primarily it is about three oil plays, the Bakken, Eagle Ford and the Permia.

The data for this chart was taken from the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report. The data is through December 2013 but the last four months must be taken with a grain of salt. They are nothing but a wild guess from the EIA. For instance December production in the Bakken was down over 50,000 barrels per day but the this report has the Bakken up by over 20,000 bp/d. Not to worry however they will correct the data in three or four months.

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Reverse Engineering the North Dakota Bakken Data

02/21/201402/25/2014 Ron Patterson 138 Comments

Notice: The data I thought would be out today: EIA Crude Oil Production by State will not be out until Thursday, Feb. 27th. However I will have another post coming out later today anyway.

This is a guest post by Ovi Colavincenzo

There is considerable discussion on this site regarding when the North Dakota portion of the Bakken will peak. Having looked at the monthly Bakken data that the State publishes, it raised the question of whether it was possible to do a reverse analysis of the data and then use it to develop a model that would replicate the ND Bakken production, exactly. The objective being to provide further insight on what is happening in the ND Bakken.

In order to do this, the following conditions and information were required:

A monotonically increasing number of new producing wells
A typical/average decline curve for the ND Bakken field
Not too many wells being shut/reworked each month

The last bullet is a preferred condition because if a number of low producing wells are shut and replaced by newer high producing wells, then the estimated flow rate of the new wells will be on the high side.

From 1999 to mid 2005, approximately 200 wells were in production in every month. The addition of an increasing number of new wells began to occur in mid-2005, so start date for the analysis was set at the beginning of 2008 to address the first bullet point above.

Figure 1: Source: The Shale Revolution” by J.D. Hughes

For the decline curves, two were used and are shown in Figures 1 and 2. One came from “The Shale Revolution” by J.D. Hughes, November 19, 2013 shown in Figure 1. The other came from North Dakota’s Directors cut, “Tribal Leader Summit” 09 05 12 (PDF), Figure 2.

Figure 2: Source: North Dakota Director’s Cut “Tribal Leader Summit”

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Bakken Update, Big Drop in December

02/14/201402/14/2014 Ron Patterson 118 Comments

North Dakota has published the latest production numbers.
ND Monthly Oil Production Statistics (All North Dakota)
ND Monthly Bakken* Oil Production Statistics (Bakken Only)

Bakken production fell 48,395 bp/d to 862,389 bp/d and all North Dakota production fell 53,226 bp/d to 923,227 bp/d. That was after Bakken November production had been revised up by 2,908 bp/d and North Dakota November production was revised up by 3,173 bp/d.

From the Director’s Cut

<i>The drilling rig count was up from Nov to Dec, but the number of well completions dropped from 138 to 119. Days from spud to initial production increased 18 days to 132. Investor confidence appears to be growing, but there is still some concerns about the uncertainty surrounding federal policies on taxation and hydraulic fracturing regulation, but the big story is the December weather. Low temperatures of 21 to 31 degrees below zero, 4 major snow events, and 5 major wind events. Dickinson had the 4th coldest December on record and from Williston to Bismarck it was the 9th snowiest December since 1890.</i>

The December decline in North Dakota production was the highest in the history of the state. Total North Dakota increased production in 2012 by 233,349 barrels per day. However the increase in 2013 was only 154,317 bp/d. Their production increase was 34 percent less in 2013 than it was in 2012.
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