Director's Cut: May 15, 2013, For March, 2013; Amazing What Is Buried In These Stories

New production numbers are preliminary and subject to revision.

Another Bismarck Tribune story, more records broken.

The Bismarck Tribune also reports the story. I sometimes find it amazing what gets buried in these stories. The lede:  "ho-hum" report. That may be: daily oil production did not increase much in March. But the headline should have been this: there are currently five (5) natural gas gathering and processing plants under construction in North Dakota.

I don't know now many natural gas plants are in North Dakota, but it was a big deal when ONEOK came in, during the Bakken boom, and built the first five. In my mind, another five being constructed is a big, big deal. Hopefully we will more about them. North Dakota currently has the capacity to process about 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas; Helms says that should eventually peak out at 1.5 billion cubic feet. 

New all-time high for production: 782,812 bopd -- compare to February: 779,050 bopd. That's a very, very small increase, but Lynn Helms thought the March numbers might actually show a decrease due to severe weather in March.

The number of producing wells is also at a new all-time high: 8,634 (up from 8,492)

Permitting:

• April: 202
• March: 218
• February: 185
• January: 218

Comments:

March weather was much worse than February; March had three major storms. The rig count increased slightly, but the number of well completions dropped by 30 to 140. A reader recently noted that the number of wells waiting on completion was creeping up; he thought the number was around 410. In March, the number of wells waiting on completion was 440.

For comparison purposes, the NDIC estimated that at the end of January there were about 375 wells waiting on completion.

One can find the Director's Cut at the NDIC home page.

With regard to flaring:

Helms said the high percentage of natural gas flaring also remains high.

"Flaring, unfortunately, stayed at 29 percent," Helms said. "As the wells mature, (there's) a lot more gas production."

Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority, said additional gathering lines for collecting natural gas from wells haven't kept pace with increasing production. A bright spot, however, is that new processing capacity has come online.

He noted that Oneok's Stateline I and Stateline II natural gas processing plants near Williston came online recently. The company's 600-mile Bakken Natural Gas Liquids Pipeline stretching from North Dakota to northern Colorado also was recently completed.

"We'll start seeing some significant progress," Kringstad said.

Kringstad declined to name a specific timeframe as to when the percentage of flared natural gas is expected to drop or to what percentage it may decline to.