Bakken Oil Production by County

Bakken by county data can be found here: North Dakota Drilling and Production Statistics
And the pertinent data can be found here: Oil and Gas Production Report

Rune Likvern has been kind enough to post me the following two graphs and comments. Rune’s comments are in italics.

Edit: At the bottom of this post I have just added two more charts and comments by Rune.

Most of the production growth comes from McKenzie county, then follows Dunn, the other two are slowing down. Mountrail was the big one.

Looking at additions of producing wells most of the recent action is in McKenzie, others are slowing down thus slowing production growth from these. That spike in August for McKenzie is interesting.

September I expect to see good numbers, from there it is all about the weather. A pipeline spilled around 20 kb oil in a wheat field, and it took 12 days for the spill to be reported. The pipeline ruptured and had a capacity of 20 kb/d.

Thanks Rune

I created the following graphs in order to give you some idea of what happened in August. The first is Bakken by County in Barrels per day for July and August.

The following Chart is Producing Wells by County. Instead of sorting by the number of wells I have kept the same order as above, sorted by total production.

I think this next chart is a real eye opener. There were 118 additional wells added in August over July. Here is what each county added.

Of the 118 additional wells, McKenzie County got 105 of them. Now if you add all the numbers that added wells it comes to a lot more than 118. That is because some counties had negative added producing wells. That means more wells were shut in than new wells added. Ward, Golden Valley and McLean county lost 2 wells each, Billings lost 4 and Bowman county lost a whopping 82  wells.

Also the number of new wells, or the number of additional wells, continues to be a muddy mess. The data above agrees with Director Helm’s numbers, 9,334 in July and 9,452 in August. But subtracting July from August we get 118 additional wells. Helms said 130 new wells were added. But in the very data Helms uses, we have hard proof that Helms’ numbers are bogus. By just deleting the counties with negative added wells, we get a total of 210 additional wells.

But that still does not tell the whole story. Looking at their data it is obvious that shutting in wells is a very common thing. Quite obviously some new wells were added in those countries with negative additional wells. And just as obvious there were wells shut in in those counties with positive numbers has some wells shut in. So obviously there were even a lot more than 210 new wells put on line in August. 

More Charts and comments from Rune on Shut In Wells.

There is something about well counting which also have me wondering, for that reason I am in the process of looking at the numbers for  wells capable of producing minus number of wells actual producing = idle wells.

Below preliminary results, but should be sufficient to see if there is a pattern.

For McKenzie as the total numbers of both wells capable of producing and actual producing, the number of idle wells went up, by around 100 during a period of a year.

The reason for wells going idle may be several and operational related, but there is a piece of interesting information here because as the monthly reports shows changes in number of producing wells this does not necessarily translate into only new wells there is a, some of these wells may have been shut in (for months) and restarted, thus becoming operational again.

Looking at how the portion of wells that are idle relative to number of wells capable of producing, I wanted to see if there was any seasonal effects, and it appears as in winter a bigger portion becomes idle likely due to harder to get them maintained (accessibility issues due to snow, temperatures and perhaps maintenance crews).

Note how McKenzie saw a reduction in number of and portion of idle wells from July to August (2013), in other words the change in producing wells were all due to new wells.

 Apparently there is more to the data the further one digs and production changes appears to be due to several reasons.

One Comment on "Bakken Oil Production by County"

Others on Sat, 19th Oct 2013 12:58 am 



Mainstream media reports on both sides.
Some say that North Dakota is setting production records. Some say that the depletion is quite high.

But shale is every where and we can expect Oil companies to drill everywhere. Every American will come to seeing Oil wells everywhere.