Tag: North Dakota

AEO 2015, The EIA’s Crude Production Expectations

Ron Patterson 235 Comments

The EIA came out with its final update of Annual Energy Outlook 2015. It seems that the EIA is extremely optimistic concerning future US crude oil production.

AEO 2015

Here is a comparison with AEO 2014. The EIA still expects US crude production to peak in 2019 but at 10,472,000 bpd or 824,000 barrels per day higher than the expected last year. But the biggest difference is in the EIA’s change in decline expectations. They now expect the US to be producing 9,329,000 bpd in 2040 or 1,812 higher than they had 2040 production last year. This is the EIA’s reference, or most likely case.

AEO 2015 1

Production from tight formations leads the growth in U.S. crude oil production across all AEO2015 cases. The path of projected crude oil production varies significantly across the cases, with total U.S. crude oil production reaching high points of 10.6 million barrels per day (bbl/d) in the Reference case (in 2020), 13.0 million bbl/d in the High Oil Price case (in 2026), 16.6 million bbl/d in the High Oil and Gas Resource case (in 2039), and 10.0 million bbl/d in the Low Oil Price case (in 2020).

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US January Production Data + Neutral Zone

Ron Patterson 530 Comments

The latest Petroleum Supply Monthly is out with the USA production numbers for January 2015. The data is thousand barrels per day with the last data point January 2015.

USA C+C

US C+C production was down 135,000 barrels per day in January. That is the biggest monthly decline since July of 2011.

I have shortened the states data to 25 months in order to give more emphasis on the January 2015 data.

North Dakota

North Dakota was down 37,000 barrels per day, exactly what the NDIC reported. That is because the EIA gets their data from the states.

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Petroleum Supply Monthly + Guest Post

Ron Patterson 460 Comments

The EIA has published their Petroleum Supply Monthly with all US production numbers through December 2014. The chart below shows the largest changes in December and Yearly production. Almost every state had a production increase. The largest decliner was Wyoming, down 7,000 bpd. Below are the biggest gainers and the amount of their production increase in thousand barrels per day for December and the whole year.

  December 2014
US 187 1366
Texas 49 684
North Dakota 39 297
GOM 68 157

GOM

The Gulf of Mexico was up 68,000 bpd in December but was down 56,000 bpd in November. The EIA had great hopes for the GOM expecting it to hit 2 million barrels per day in 2016. I don’t think that is going to happen. GOM production now stands at 1,441,000 bpd

Alaska

Alaska’s decline seems to be slowing down slightly. They are now at 520,000 bpd.

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The Bakken, What the Data Tells US

Ron Patterson 514 Comments

I have been supplied an Excel spreadsheet of all North Dakota wells back to 2006, thanks to Enno Peters and Dennis Coyne. I only used the data back to 2007 however. This is a wealth of information for if we want to know how many wells came on line in a given month, we simply count them. We are given the monthly production data for each month. And since we have the monthly production data we can very easily figure the decline rate of each well, or any group of wells for any month or year.

A note on the data. The first month data was almost always for a partial month. Sometimes the well came on line near the first of the month and sometimes near the end of the month. To get around this problem I have started with the second month, which is the first full month, and used that month as the first month of all my data. All data and charts below include all North Dakota wells, not just the Bakken.

NDIC Production Decline

Production per well has gradually increased each year. 2014 was the highest first month production but also the highest decline rate. Note that on the first month 2014 production is 29 barrels per day above 2013 1st month and 131 barrels per day above 2008 1st month.  But the 2014 10th month was 7 bpd below the 2013 10th month. And by the 13th month only 7 barrels per day separated the 2008 data and the 2013 data.

Bottom line is, though the new wells produce more, they decline a lot faster.

NDIC 1st Year BPD

 Barrels per day per well, for the entire year, discarding the first partial month and measuring the 2nd through 13th month, averaged 230 BPD for 2013 and 241 BPD for 2014. The first-year barrels per day per well has increased every year except for 2012.

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