North Dakota – update through January 2022

By: Enno Peters
Published: Mar 18, 2022

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 17,045 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2001 onward, through January.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota from horizontal wells fell by 5% m-o-m, to 1.04 million b/d in January. Natural gas output dropped by 7% to below 2.8 Bcf/d.

Supply projection

During the past month, 29 rigs have been drilling horizontal wells (according to Baker Hughes). We project that with this level of activity, output has probably already increased again to a level of around 1.1 million b/d (from our Supply Projection dashboard):

Horizontal rig count and tight oil outlook in North Dakota, by county, based on the current rig count and well/rig productivity.

The top chart displays the horizontal rig count over time, while the bottom one plots the total historical and projected oil production from existing and future horizontal wells, colored by county.

Well performance

Well results in the core 4 counties have increased over the years until 2018. Since then, average well performance has leveled off, as you can see in the top-right chart in the following overview:

Operators achieve the best results in McKenzie County, where a horizontal well that came online in 2019/2020 has recovered almost 250 thousand barrels of oil in the first 18 months, on average. The bottom-right chart reveals that proppant loadings are no longer increasing.

Top operators

The final tab shows the production history and location of the top 15 operators in North Dakota. Continental Resources was far in the lead in January, with 170 thousand b/d of operated production, followed by Marathon and Hess, both good for around 100 thousand b/d.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on the Permian, for which we already have January production data in our subscription services.

Sources

For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:

DMR of North Dakota. These presentations only show the production from horizontal wells; a small amount (about 40 kbo/d) is produced from conventional vertical wells.
FracFocus.org

Brief manual

The above presentations have many interactive features:

You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.
Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items. You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.
Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.
You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.
By clicking on the legend you can highlight selected items.
Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.
The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.
If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.