LTO – Page 17 – Peak Oil Barrel

Bakken Sweet Spots are Petering Out

11/22/201411/23/2014 Ron Patterson 420 Comments

The Bakken, as well as other shale oil areas, is not one homogeneous area where equal amounts of can be found. David Hughes in DRILLING DEEPER puts it this way, though here he is talking about gas wells, the same applies to oil wells:

All shale gas plays invariably have “core” areas or “sweet spots”, where individual well production is highest and hence the economics are best. Sweet spots are targeted and drilled off early in a play’s lifecycle, leaving lesser quality rock to be drilled as the play matures (requiring higher gas prices to be economic); thus the number of wells required to offset field decline inevitably increases with time.

However the Bakken, at least through the September North Dakota Industrial Commission production report, has given no real indication that the Bakken is even close to peaking. But a closer look at the data makes me believe that is all about to change.

The NDIC issues a Daily Activity Report where they list permits issued as well as wells completed and wells released from the tight hole confidential list. These reports usually, but not always, also give the number of barrels of oil per day and barrels of water per day for the first 24 hours of production. I have gone through every day, back to November 1st, 2013 and collected the data on every well listed that gives production numbers and copied that data to Excel. In that one year and three weeks I have gathered the data form every one of the 2,171 wells that give production numbers. Sorting these wells by well number, which is the original permit number, gives some startling results.

To smooth the chart I created a 200 well average of barrels per day per well. The first point on the chart is therefore the average to the 200th well, #23890 and the last point is the 200 well average to the 2171st well, #28971. As you can see there has been a continuous, though erratic, decline in first 24 hour production as the well numbers increase.

Breaking this down according to well numbers we see production peaked with the 2400s and have steady decline since. Every group of well numbers do not contain the same number of wells.
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Post Carbon Institute’s LTO Reality Check

10/27/201410/28/2014 Ron Patterson 272 Comments

The Post Carbon Institute has just released a critique of the EIA’s Light Tight Oil projections. It is titled DRILLING DEEPER. The report is highly critical of the EIA’s projections and should be read by everyone interested in Peak Oil.

All data on all charts is in million barrels per day unless otherwise specified.

First a look at the EIA oil projections for US production from all sources. They expect offshore to increase to 2 million barrels per day by 2016, an increase of almost 600,000 bpd from current production. Also note that the EIA has US almost peaking in 2016 and increasing only slightly until the peak in 2019.

The EIA has several projections, covering all bases. However the reference, or most likely, will be the only one covered in this post.
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More David Archibald on LTO plus Net Imports

09/24/201409/24/2014 Ron Patterson 286 Comments

David Archibald has recently revised his peak date for shale oil. The below was contained in a recent post I received from him:

Ron,

For what it is worth, just to let you know that I have recanted on my estimate of US LTO production.

This is from reading the presentations put out in September by the US independents. I started with the EOG presentation and then worked through the others that EOG referred to. If Hubbert-type analysis works for LTO, it may be too early to apply it.

The rig count for the Bakken etc may be down to flat but the fraccing units are pumping a lot more sand and the economics of fraccing have improved a lot over the last two years. That in turn means that the resource is larger at a given IRR cutoff. This is currently my best guess of the three major plays:

Others are appearing such as SCOOP in Oklahoma.

I tried to make the graph useful by putting in the cumulative production to 2035 so that people can mentally adjust it for what they think EUR might be. The Permian has a lot of NGLs and natural gas which means that the energy produced is about twice as large as the oil component. The reason I didn’t make the Permian as peaky as the Eagle Ford for example is that there at lot of stacked plays in the Permian. Once companies have got acreage and got one horizon working, they don’t have to be in a rush to develop the others.

The US LTO boom is worth about two to three years of conventional oil decline:

With further demand destruction, the US will become energy independent.
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Bakken, North Dakota & Production by County

07/15/201407/15/2014 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?

Or this type?

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.
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EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report

07/14/201407/14/2014 Ron Patterson 63 Comments

Note: Just as I was finishing this post North Dakota published their production numbers for May 2014. North Dakota production was up over 36,000 barrels per day on 227 new well completions according to The Director’s Cut. I will have a post on all that tomorrow.

The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report has just came out. Below are a few charts gleaned from that report. The World’s seven largest publicly owned oil companies have peaked. Their combined production has declined 12.4% since 2009.

The Drilling Productivity Report shows, or tries to show, the true decline rate of shale oil and gas. I usually only track the oil however.

In January the EIA estimated that Bakken production from new wells would equal 88 kb/d. They estimated that the declines of all older wells would equal 63 kb/d leaving net production at 25 kb/d.

In August they estimate that Bakken production from new wells will equal 90 kb/d or 2 kb/d above January new well production. They estimate that the decline from older wells will equal 73 kb/d, an increase of 10 kb/d from January, leaving a net increase in production of 17 kb/d.

Eagle Ford fared a bit different. In January they thought new well production would increase by 120 kb/d while older wells would decline by 91 kb/d leaving net production 29 kb/d. In August they expect production from new wells will equal 140 kb/d, a whopping 20 kb/d over January numbers. However decline from older wells will have increased to 115 kb/d, 24 kb/d more than it was in January, leaving net production up 25 kb/d. So in spite of the 20 kb/d increase over January new well production, net production will still be 2 kb/d lower than January.
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