Production Days in the Bakken

A reader sent the following as a comment, but in case some folks don't see comments, I post it here again, with my less-than-adequate, and poorly articulated reply (English was never my forte). But first, the very excellent comment sent in by a reader:

I just prepared a spreadsheet of every Brooklyn well from IP through latest figures. Until earlier this year, there was never an anomally of this size or across this number of wells in terms of reduced production days. These numbers speak to throttled production, but not causation which is hypothesized about quite well by [other readers].

Depending upon causation, the restart to full monthly production will be diffferent. If it is takeaway capacity, that does not get fixed overnight and any version of Keystone is still far away. If it is futures contracts, then production will be reactive with the price of oil. On the former, EPPING's giant Colt terminal has recently come online and it is within 7 miles of Brooklyn. Thus, suspect that CLR's futures contracts are fully fulfilled and the current spread with WTI encourages them to keep it in the ground. My folks raised cattle, and when it was time for them to go to market - you had to take what the market gave you. Oil in place does appear to be different. It would be interesting to hear if there is evidence of similar throttling in CLR's other Baaken footprint. 

My reply:

I can't comment at all on what is driving the decreased production in Brooklyn field (and I assume elsewhere). That would be a great research project for an MBA student for at some university; not worthy of a PhD thesis, but a short paper nonetheless.

This is what I find interesting: assume there were no reasons for throttling back (no problems with takeaway; no price differentials; no road restrictions; no manpower issues; etc) -- ND continues to set new monthly records for production -- can one imagine what those monthly numbers would be without throttling back? 

I'm an eternal optimist, and when I see Divide County besting Bowman County after all these years, and then ND setting a new production record in May despite throttling back; and we aren't even close to max number of wells per spacing unit, the potential seems to me -- most eternal optimist -- that under optimum circumstances, the oil potential of North Dakota is quite remarkable.

And, oh, by the way, two more CLR-Brooklyn oil field permits this past week.

I'm starting to look at production days in other fields. Will take some time.