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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Top 40 Producers in North Dakota, by Production -- 2009

Oil, gas, and water statistics are available but I am only including the barrels of oil (in millions of barrels):
  • EOG: 13.039
  • BR:10.674
  • CLR: 8.185
  • WLL: 6.760
  • HES: 6.606
  • MRO: 4.065
  • Encore: 3.068
  • Slawson: 1.923
  • Murex: 1.921
  • XTO: 1.912
  • Hunt: 1.895
  • Petro-Hunt: 1.886
  • SM: 1.702
  • Fidelity: 1.160
  • Zenergy: 0.812
  • Newfield: 0.666
  • BTA: 0.664
  • BEXP: 0.601
  • Sagebrush: 0.510
  • Tracker: 0.510
  • Oasis: 0.471
  • Citation: 0.465
  • Luff: 0.404
  • Peak: 0.357
  • Encore Energy Partners: 0.351
  • Eagle: 0.344
  • KOG: 0.334
  • Anschutz: 0.328
  • Summit: 0.319
  • Samson Resources: 0.287
  • Zargon: 0.275
  • Sinclair: 0.244
  • Helis: 0.241
  • True: 0.226
  • Ward-Williston: 0.221
  • COP: 0.214
  • Prima: 0.213
  • Berenergy: 0.199
  • G3: 0.186
  • Armstrong: 0.163
It will be interesting to see what the 2010 results will be. I was surprised not to see Zavanna on the top 40 list. I assume Oasis will move up significantly in 2010. I was surprised to see how far down BEXP was on this list, but I expect it to move up in 2010. BR is owned by COP. EOG has overtaken BR for the top spot (in 2009); it was not long ago that BR was #1 on the list. It's amazing how fast the production drops once you get past the top five or six producers.

The list comes from the Rocky Mountain Oil Journal.

American Standard Acquires Additional Acres in Bakken, Three Forks -- North Dakota, USA

From Rigzone:
American Standard has executed a Purchase Agreement to acquire additional Bakken and Three Forks acreage including partial interest in 26 additional gross wells, of which 15 are currently producing, 10 completing and one drilling. The additional 367 plus net mineral acres acquired in the transaction are located within the Williston Basin of North Dakota. This acreage is located in the heart of the established area known as the Bakken. 
The acreage currently produces 2,900 barrels of oil daily.

With this acquisition, American Standard now has 6,000 acres of Bakken acreage. The article did not state how many acres were acquired in this transaction, nor the dollar cost of the deal.

Twelve (12) New Permits in North Dakota -- USA

Operators: XTO (5), QEP (2), Anschutz, Marathon, Newfield, Whiting, and Tracker.

Fields: Heart Butte, Indian Hill, Capa, Billings, Reunion Bay, Banks, and three wildcats.

The two QEP wells will be on the same pad. 

The XTO wells are all in the reservation; XTO was bought by XOM earlier this summer; that deal was completed in July, 2010.

The Whiting permit is another Brueni well, in Stark County.

Several wells off the confidential list today, but all those that reported IPs have been posted at the usual page.

Another Crude Oil Loading Rail Terminal -- COLT -- $100 Million Investment in Williams County -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Rangeland: The COLT Hub and COLT Connector terminal and pipeline.

The link. The first open-access oil marketing hub in North Dakota.

This really is incredible. This company, which I had never heard of before, and probably is new to North Dakota, is going to invest $100 million in Williams County. Williston, the heart of the Bakken, and the eponymous name for the basin, is the county seat. To put $100 million in perspective: Williston set a city record this year in building permits, surpassing $100 million. The previous record was $44 million set in 2009. It is an understatement to say this is huge, but there is so much happening in the Bakken it is hard to keep up, much less quantify what is happening. I can only imagine all the blue-collar construction workers that will be needed to execute this investment.


COLT Hub and COLT Pipeline
Operational by December 2011
COLT Connector Pipeline
20-mile; 40,000 barrel/day; Williams County
Connects existing collecting site 8 miles south of Tioga to new COLT Hub near Epping, ND
COLT Hub
On-site storage; scalable
Initially two 90,000 bbl tanks; one 30,000 bbl tank = 210,000 bbl on-site storage
Railway
BNSF
Will load both unit train and manifest shipment of oil
Market: US markets, including along the Gulf Coast
Capacity: 60,000 b/d railcar loading facilities
Miscellaneous note: Warren Buffett owns BNSF
 

2009: North Dakota Crude Oil Reserves Increased 83% / 481 Million Barrels

This article was a bit confusing to me simply because it mixed reserves of crude oil and natural gas. One has to read it closely to keep things straight.

Reserves of both natural gas and crude oil increased in 2009. I won't talk about natural gas in this posting because I think of North Dakota as a crude oil state, not a natural gas state.
Proved reserves increased in each of the five largest oil and condensate areas: Texas, the Gulf of Mexico federal offshore, California, Alaska, and North Dakota. Nearly all of Texas’ 11% gain of 529 million bbl was in the Permian basin. North Dakota was up 83% or 481 million bbl.
In my simple mind there's not a lot of difference between 481 million barrels and 529 million barrels especially when you consider the size of the two states, Texas compared to North Dakota.

However, there is a heck of huge difference between an eleven percent gain and an eighty-three percent gain.

Of course these numbers will change significantly after 2010 when the  Eagle Ford in Texas is more fully developed.

I think one can safely say the Gulf of Mexico federal offshore is in a world of hurt in the near future; Alaska and California, perhaps less so.

Best Commentary of the Year Regarding America's Dependency on Foreign Oil?

This may just be the best article of the year regarding America's dependency on foreign oil and how to take advantage of it.

I enjoyed this article for two reasons.

First, this author's model that explains the reason behind America's dependency on foreign oil meshes with mine with one or two exceptions.

Second, the author does not wring his hands. He realizes he can't fix it: it is what is. (That, by the way, has become one of my favorite lines when coming to intractable arguments.)

America's dependency on foreign oil: it's a fact of life. It isn't going to change in my investing lifetime.

The author places a lot of the blame on the oil companies.  (It should be noted that it is not the oil companies that have placed off-shore drilling off-limits. The Obama administration has just extended the moratorium all along the eastern seaboard and the Gulf around Florida for another seven years. That was not the oil companies that extended the moratorium. And I seriously doubted they lobbied the administration to extend the moratorium.)

Be that as it may. The blame game doesn't help investors. It is what it is.

And the author makes investment recommendations. The article was published several days before today's nice run-up in the price of oil.

For Newbies Only: About Those Pesky Decline Rates

For newbies: there is a horrendous decline rate in Bakken and Three Forks Sanish wells in the Williston Oil Basin.

By "decline rate," I am referring to the announced initial production (IP) of a  well and subsequent production. This decline rate has been talked about from the very beginning and can be seen graphically on corporate presentations, Whiting and Continental Resources, having among the best presentations.

I  have opined frequently that the drillers will figure this out and over time the decline rate itself will decline. It's already begun to happen, as evidenced by the drillers themselves and their presentations.

My gut feeling is that the decline rates themselves are pretty unreliable (the trend is not unreliable; the trend is real; what is unreliable are the actual numbers, in my mind).

Last week there was a well with a typical Bakken initial production number, but by the time the well had come off the confidential list, the subsequent production numbers were significantly lower. One cannot generalize from these individual results.

Let's say a hypothetical well has an initial production of 3,000 barrels in a an early 24-hour period. But then two months later it's down to 300 barrels/day.  What spurious events might have aggravated the decline rate?

If the well was not hooked up to a pipeline, the accompanying natural gas was being flared off. North Dakota state law places restrictions on how much oil can be produced from a well that is flaring natural gas. That's why one occasionally sees requests to waive those restrictions come to the NDIC.

If the well is not hooked up to a pipeline, and there are only four tanks on the pad (which is not unusual in the Bakken), only 4 x 400 barrels of oil (1,600 barrels) can be accumulated before the tanks are full. And then trucks have to come in to haul the oil away.

When there were only 100 rigs operating in the Bakken in the early days of the current boom, there was a shortage of trucks and drivers. Now there are a record 165 active rigs in the Bakken. In addition, the wells are producing more oil per well than they were a year ago. Does one really think that there are that many more trucks and truck drivers in the Bakken now than there were a year ago. There's no housing available.

Even if the shortage of trucks and drivers is resolved, the roads are still a significant problem. The wells are in remote locations and one just doesn't go out and empty those tanks when one feels like it.

If a truck is scheduled to go to a particular well, and a gusher comes in elsewhere, the oil company now has to decide how to redeploy those trucks.

There were days last winter when all trucks were stopped for several days due to blizzard conditions.  For wells not on a pipeline, the tanks will fill up and the well will be turned off (from a remote location, or automatically if the tanks are full).

If the price of oil drops, the operator might find it better to stop the pumping until the price of oil goes back up.

If the pipelines are full, a particular well might not be able to get its oil into the pipeline. This was a significant problem earlier this summer when Enbridge experienced not one, but two, oil spills completely shutting down major pipelines. Whiting even announced it would miss its third quarter production targets due to the shutdown.

In addition, wells are occasionally taken off-line for "work-overs," processes to clean out the wells to make them more efficient again, or to fix problems that might have developed.

To the best of my knowledge, it is a rare well that is flowing at maximum rates 365 days a year.

I have no idea how the statisticians sort out decline rates that are affected by man-made factors noted above, but I know that for me, I cannot simply look at production numbers of a given well to sort out whether it is a great well or an uneconomical well.

This has not been proofread; I need to go over it, but I need to pick up my granddaughter from school, first.