North Dakota Expects "Big Surge" In Production This Summer

I think I posted this story earlier, when it was running in a regional newspaper, such as The Bismarck Tribune. It's been picked up by Bloomberg (note the date, July 15, 2014):

North Dakota, the second-largest oil-producing state in the U.S., expects output to surge through the summer as more benign weather gives roughnecks extra time to work in the field.

Output rose about 3.6 percent to 1.04 million barrels a day in May, the state’s Department of Mineral Resources reported yesterday. It was the largest increase since August.

The growth came even as rain and high winds kept well-completion crews out of the fields for several days during the month. Better summer weather will lead to production growth in the region of 5 to 6 percent a month in June, July and August, said Lynn Helms, director of the state’s Department of Mineral Resources.

“We still expect the big surge to come in June, July and August in terms of completions and some really rapid production increases,” Helms said on a conference call with reporters yesterday.

North Dakota is home to the majority of the Bakken shale formation, an underground layer of oil-and-gas-rich rock. High oil prices and improvements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies have helped output from the state’s portion of the Bakken rise fivefold over the past five years.

Texas, which extracts more than 3 million barrels a day, is the only state producing more crude. North Dakota pumped more oil than three OPEC member nations in May.

Much more at the linked article; much the same as we've heard before.

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Exponential Growth In Production

I discussed this at an earlier post.

I know I'm going to get into a lot of trouble for posting this again, but it's interesting to say the least.

Starting with production of 547,326 bopd in January, 2012, and currently standing at 1,039,635 bopd as of May, 2014, the exponential formula comes very close to:

P = P(0)*1.023^t

where P = current daily production
P(0) = initial daily production (January, 2012)
t = time in months (exponent)

Plugging into the formula:
1,034,579  bopd (May, 2014)= 547,326 bopd (January, 2012) * 1.023^28

At the same rate, in January, 2015 (the Director's Cut will be out in March, 2015):
P = P(0)*1.023^36
P = 1,240,992 bopd in January, 2015

Once you have that formula you can do all kinds of things with it.

If one starts with the base month/year of January, 2011, when production was 342,088 bopd --

• Using the same formula, one would be at only 849,500 bopd, so somewhere between 2011 and 2014, the pace of production has increased.

If one starts with the base month/year of January, 2010, when production was 235,925 bopd --

• Using the same formula, one would be at only 769,674 bopd, so somewhere between 2010 and 2014, the pace of production increased even more than that between 2011 and 2014.  

With the anticipated surge this summer, the monthly increase should be greater than 2.3% month-over-month through maybe October or November, but then there could actually be some "negative" growth.

If the rate were to remain 2.3% increase month-over-month over the next several years, North Dakota would cross the 2 million bopd before January, 2017 (i.e., late 2016), using 2012 as the base year.

Disclaimer: I often make simple arithmetic mistakes. I used an on-line calculator for the calculations.

Anyway, to each his own.