ND Oil Well Completions Slow Sharply -- John Kemp, Reuters, July 22, 2015

Talk about amazing timing. This story was posted yesterday by Reuters:

LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - No new well completion reports have been filed in North Dakota since July 10, the longest gap this year, according to daily activity records published by the state's Department of Mineral Resources (DMR).

Completions, rather than wells drilled, provide the best guide to short-term changes in output, since operators can always delay completing a well and putting it into production, either because they are waiting for completion crews to be available or to wait for better prices.

Completion is usually defined as a single operation including the stimulation and testing of a well as well as the installation of surface production equipment ("Dictionary of petroleum exploration, drilling and production" 2014). North Dakota's regulators consider a well completed when the first oil is produced through wellhead equipment into tanks from the ultimate producing interval and after the well has been cased.

Well operators must file a completion report with state regulators within 30 days of the completion date, and in some circumstances immediately (https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/rules/forms/form6.PDF).

"In no case shall oil or gas be transported from the lease prior to the filing of a completion report unless approved by the (DMR) director," according to state rules.

Okay, so that was posted yesterday. It was probably written during the past couple of days by John Kemp while he was putting the data together and last edited his final draft on July 20th or July 21st.

Then this, yesterday:

The NDIC reported a record number of well completions in one day: 28 well completions reported yesterday.

I cannot verify that is a record but based on what I know about the Bakken, it appears to be a record. 

There is another data point that I did not mention from that same NDIC report yesterday: the number of wells that were reported as "producing or plugged."

I don't post that data, "producing or plugged" wells from the daily activity report, mostly because it does not add much to my knowledge base of the Bakken. It is interesting for mineral rights owners of individual wells but in the aggregate the data does not help me better understand the Bakken, the purpose of this blog. I reported years ago when first blogging that 99% of all "producing or plugged wells would eventually be shown to be "producing." I waited until the IPs were reported to post the new wells.

However, a reader yesterday noted that there was a fairly large number of "producing or plugged" wells on the daily activity report that also showed the 28 completions. There were nine (9), including Hess, Oasis (with 5 of the 9), BR, and EOG.

Remember, a few data points:

• for the past two months, the NDIC has reported 925 wells waiting for completion
• operators are drilling about 100 new wells/month, I suppose (based on 70 active rigs)
• the number of permits on a monthly basis is holding steady, perhaps creeping up slightly
• operators are expected to complete wells within one year of spudding
• winter is just around the corner.

One NDIC report does not a Bakken summer make, so it will be interesting to see whether the number of completions reported in one day was a one-off (an anomaly) or whether John Kemp had the misfortune of posting a great article that was out of date the very day it was posted.

By the way, look at this story that was just posted the other day suggesting shale well completions were rising, once again.