Just How Big Is The Bakken? Pretty Big -- September 15, 2017

Staggering: With 60,000 wells in the Bakken, using current technology and current completion strategies the oil companies will extract one-tenth of all the original-oil-in-place (OOIP) -- Lynn Helms.

How many producing wells right now? About 14,000. At the height of the boom, oil companies completed about 2,000 wells/year. Now, with the slump in oil prices, about 600 wells will be completed this year.

At 1,000 wells / year, to add another 40,000 wells, 40 years of drilling activity. And that will get us 10% of the OOIP.

Link here.

Graphic here:

To date: amount oil companies have invested in drilling wells, completing wells, and laying pipeline to transport Bakken oil -- $125 billion. About $2 million / every North Dakota resident (adults and children).

As long as we're having fun, let's work this backwards:

• assume each well in primary production eventually produces 1 million bbls / oil (over 30 years of production)
• 60,000 wells x 1 million bbls = 60,000 million or 60 billion bbls of oil
• 60 billion bbls of oil is one-tenth of OOIP which means the OOIP reservoir is 600 billion bbls
• Leigh Price suggested 500 billion bbls OOIP

The law of big numbers seems to work out.

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For A Contrarian View ....

... and a little bit of humor, I can't resist reminding readers of Art Berman's column earlier this year:

It’s the beginning of the end for the Bakken Shale play.

The decline in Bakken oil production that started in January 2015 is probably not reversible. New well performance has deteriorated, gas-oil ratios have increased and water cuts are rising. Much of the reservoir energy from gas expansion is depleted and decline rates should accelerate. More drilling may increase daily output for awhile but won’t resolve the underlying problem of poorer well performance and declining per-well reserves.

December 2016 production fell 92,000 barrels per day (b/d)–a whopping 9% single-month drop (Figure 1). Over the past two years, output has fallen 285,000 b/d (23%). This was despite an increase in the number of producing wells that reached an all-time high of 13,520 in November. That number fell by 183 wells in December.

What a doofus.

Bakken production remains over one million bopd. Bakken crude oil production rose 1.4% month-over-month in most recent report and that was despite the fact that a) WTI is still not priced in Bakken's favor; b) the number of producing wells has remained about constant; c) there are about 1,500 wells shut in for various reasons; and, d) there are about 800 DUCs that can be brought on line in days, not months.