Drilling/Completion Costs of a Typical Bakken Well -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

When I posted information on an incredible Dakota-3 well, I forgot to include the cost of the well.

The data for this well is found here.

• 18922, 472, Dakota-3 (WMB), Dakota-3 Skunk Creek 1-12H, (South Fork field), 19,354 bbls in first 14 days; s9/10; t6/11; F; cum 132k 11/11 

The cost for this well:
Cost of well, according to the "well completion summary":

• AFE budgeted: $6,487,650.00
• Actual: drilling, $3,610,264.00; completion (fracking), $3,685,033.65. Total: $7,295,297,65.

This is not an old well; this is not old data. This well was completed about six months ago. Note the cost of this long lateral.

Some data points:

• short laterals used to cost upwards of $5 million; this is a long lateral at $7 million
• the hand-wringing of Newfield in the 3Q11 conference call, saying "we" had seen the last of $10 million wells (meaning, wells would cost more than $10 million going forward)
• as a rule of thumb, some folks say that completing (fracking) a well represents about half the total cost of a Bakken well; look how true that is in this case
• cost per fracking stage is said to be about $100,000; this was $3.7 million/17 stages --> $220,000/stage; going forward I will use $200,000 per stage
• Schlumberger has said that fracking costs will go down; actually they said that there will be pricing pressure on fracking that will affect their bottom line in 2012
• if folks keep number of fracking stages at 20 or below, they might be able to keep total costs below that Newfield $10 million figure, and the just is still out whether one has to go to 20 stages at this point, or whether one can re-frac later on, with more stages (I don't know if that's even possible)