June, 2013, Director's Cut Is Out; Production Sets A New Daily Record; Flaring Continues To Drop

Link here.

June oil: 821,415 bopd -- new all-time high.
May oil: 811,262 bopd

A 1.25% increase. Not particularly impressive. The poll is obviously closed in which we asked whether production would set a new record or not:

• Yes, by < 2%: 30%
• Yes, by 2 - 4%: 49%
• Yes, by > 4%: 19%
• No: 3%

I don't have another poll ready to go, so I will leave this poll up for awhile.

One can track actual/estimated production numbers here.

Other data from the Director's Cut:

Producing wells at a new all-time high: 9,071 (up from 8,932).

The price of oil keeps creeping upward: $88 in May; $95 in July.

Rig count is shown at 186, two higher than what I saw earlier this morning.  The NDIC site actually shows 185 active rigs right now.

The director noted: although the rig count has remained fairly constant, the number of well completions fell by 4 to 139, May to June. That number of completions is still above the threshold needed to maintain production so oil production rate rose, 1.25%.

The average number of days from spud to total depth is about 22 days; and the number of days from total depth to first production averages another 94 days. So, that's about 120 days from someone showing up on the pad and the first production.

Much of the less-than-anticipated results were due to load restrictions that were extended into early June due to May, 2013, being the wettest on record. On record. Not just in the past ten years, but on record. And that is saying a lot.

The NDIC estimates that at the end of June there were about 490 wells waiting on completion services, a decrease of 10 wells.

I suppose he has said this before, but if so, it's still a fairly new comment: there are enough permits in the inventory to accommodate multi-well pads and the time required to deal with federal hydraulic fracturing rules if required.

Maybe the national media will note, but I doubt it, that with this continued increase in oil production it is remarkable that flaring in North Dakota continues to drop. Flaring dropped another 1 percent, down to 28% which is clearly less than a third, or 33%, which is the number most frequently cited. One could as accurately say only a quarter of the gas is flared compared with as much as a third when the boom started. But, I suppose, in the minds of most, there's not a lot of difference between a quarter and a third, except when picking your slice of pie. And 1% is not much of a drop but it's going in the right direction.