Life Expectancy of a Bakken Well? -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Updates

July 4, 2016: I won't remove the post below but there's a lot more to it than EUR; it all depends on what one is measuring. In the early days of the boom, I was interested in the amount of oil that the Bakken would ultimately produce. That's why I placed emphasis on the EUR rather than the other data.

However, for operators, they must have a very complicated formula adjusting for EUR, decline rate, price of oil, cost of well, and, I suppose, several other variables. For a mineral owner, the longevity of the well directly impacts how long one gets "mailbox money." For an operator, by 2016, it was becoming clear that flattening the decline rate was perhaps one of the most important factors, all else being equal. At the linked post, one finds that the decline rate early on was as "bad" as 91% but has since dropped to less than 20% in the Permian.

Original Post

 

Elsewhere there is a new thread discussing the "life expectancy of a Bakken well."

Here's the issue under discussion: "...factual data on the average lifetime of
a horizontal fracked well in the Bakken."

No one has replied yet.

I have opined on the issue under FAQs. In fact, it's question #2 at that link.

In addition to the information at FAQs (regarding longevity of Bakken wells), the life expectancy of the average Bakken well has been discussed numerous times elsewhere on the blog.

The general consensus is that Bakken wells will produce for 25 to 39 years. But the first horizontal, fracked Bakken well goes back to about 2000. [As soon as I put in any date, someone will write and tell me that there were earlier wells.  Be that as it may, it's my myth that the current Bakken boom began in 2000 in Elm Coulee, Montana, and in North Dakota, in 2007.] So, with the current boom hardly a decade along and even much less than that in North Dakota, we simply don't know how long a Bakken well will last.

Does it even matter?

It's the EUR that matters. Having said that, longevity does serve another useful purpose but I will let readers think about that before providing my opinion on why longevity is important.