The Bakken's Still-Growing Water Midstream Sector -- RBN Energy -- April 10, 2018

China: blinked. Xi says he will reduce auto tariffs. And that was after one Trump tweet. No links; easily found.

WTI pricing: it's a fool's errand to predict oil prices, but Mike Filloon is no fool and I follow him closely. I don't know if folks saw this. Mike probably posts over at SeekingAlpha averaging about one article very seven to fourteen days; sometimes more frequently; sometimes less.

In his second to last contribution he suggested oil would get to $70 this summer, but "pushing above $75 will be difficult." I suggested that I saw $68, but $70 would be a struggle (except for maybe a short period during the peak driving season).

In his most recent post, Mike suggested, very clearly, he expected $70- or $75-oil this driving season (2018).

One could argue he has not changed his position on pricing, but being an inveterate optimist, I like to think that Mike was slightly -- very slightly -- more bullish in his most recent post with regard to the price of oil. 

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

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RBN Energy: the Bakken's still-growing water midstream sector.

The Permian is a beehive of activity on the burgeoning water midstream front — the pipelines, saltwater disposal wells and other assets being built to facilitate the delivery of water to new wells for hydraulic fracturing and the transport of “produced water” from the lease to disposal or treatment sites. But the Bakken — arguably the birthplace of the water midstream sector nearly a decade ago — is no slouch, and a model of sorts for the infrastructure build-out now under way in the Permian. The volume of water needed for Bakken well completions is up sharply in recent years; more important still, the region is generating more than 1 MMb/d of produced water, and producers and water midstreamers alike are building new takeaway pipelines and drilling new SWDs to more efficiently deal with it. Today, we discuss water- and produced-water-related infrastructure in one of the U.S.’s largest production regions.

The trends toward longer horizontal wells and more intense well completions have resulted in the need for sharply higher volumes of fresh, treated or recycled water (and frac sand) in U.S. shale plays. Our understanding is that the completion of a typical horizontal well in the Bakken today requires 200 Mbbl or more of water — eight to 10 times as much as was needed to complete the much shorter laterals that were common in the early years of the Shale Era. All of that water needs to be delivered to the well site during the completion process — not an easy task in relatively dry western North Dakota.