Who's Got The Best Bakken Wells -- Richard Zeits -- WPX, Slawson, Statoil, Whiting, KOG, Newfield, And The List Goes On -- Without CLR

I wasn't going to post this until I had a chance to read it, study it, but I'm just too busy.

So, I will post it, link it, and then maybe come back to it later.

Richard Zeits is posting at SeekingAlpha:

With over eight thousand horizontal wells drilled to date in the Middle Bakken and Three Forks formations of the Williston Basin, the data set of drilling results and production histories would seem more than sufficient to draw conclusions with regard to expected drilling economics and investment returns in the play. Still, establishing a meaningful economic model for the Bakken often proves to be a challenging task. Three major factors contribute.

The article has a lot of nice basic information.

IRR is the key according to Richard Zeits. We should be seeing a lot more about IRR in corporate presentations going forward; investors and laymen are getting smarter. 

I noted that 23 operators are "ranked" on the graph provided by WPX, and CLR is not even listed. CLR is the "face of the Bakken" and probably has the most Bakken acreage. CLR was not even mentioned in the body of the article. I did a work search: "Continental Resources" comes up once: in the comments. Zeits says he has an article on CLR coming up soon. Apparently many of the wells analyzed were "CLR" wells but operated by others. It's very, very difficult to try to sort out which operator has the best wells.

When I first started blogging, I noted that Slawson really seemed to have great wells; it was borne out in this article: Slawson ranked #2.

A lot of enquiring folks elsewhere have said that Statoil hyped their IPs, and that their wells weren't all that good. In this article, Statoil ranked #3.

Whiting ranks #4: no doubt due to the Sanish.

KOG ranks #5, and could certainly move up with its new wells.

Most disappointing was where Oasis stood, but one must remember where Oasis got started.

It will be fun to look at this list in 10 years.

The delta between #1 WPX and #2 Slawson certainly raises questions with how things are measured.

Anyway, as noted, I haven't had time to really read the article.

Maybe more later.

For investors, I use something entirely different for evaluating the prospects of a Bakken operator.

For investors, the most important data point is where one thinks "we" are in the Bakken: if we are in the first inning of a nine-inning game, things look a lot different than if one feels we are in the bottom of the 7th inning in the Bakken.

I think we are in the 2nd inning.