Wow - A Perfect Way To Start the Bakken Day

RBN Energy: crude-by-rail in the Bakken.

Last week the latest set of Bakken crude production numbers showed another big increase to reach 728 Mb/d. The challenge all along for this prolific land locked basin has been one of finding a ready market for growing production. Meeting that challenge in the absence of quickly available pipeline capacity led to creative solutions and many new destinations. Today we contemplate what they are going to do with all that crude.

This new record production level for September 2012 is up another 27 Mb/d over August.   North Dakota now accounts for nearly 12 percent of total U.S. crude production, up from 1 percent less than five years ago. RBN Energy blog readers will be familiar with the reasons behind these production statistics. We recently covered overall US production increases from shale oil in the big three plays – the Bakken, Permian and Eagle Ford basins (see Will the Crude Production Boom Keep Running?).

The charts [at the linked article] show the pace of Bakken crude production since the start of 2008. [The data is for North Dakota but remember that there is also Bakken production in Montana (~50 Mb/d) and South Dakota (~5Mb/d)]. [One chart] shows actual monthly production in Mb/d. We added a trend projection (red dotted line) to [another chart] – following the period of most rapid growth from July 2011 and projecting forward until production hit 1 MMb/d during the fourth quarter of 2013.