RBN Enerugy With A Bakken Update -- May 8, 2020

Financial Times: Bakken shale -- long road back to recovery. Paywall. One can get to it via google. Archived.

North Dakota led America’s unconventional oil revolution more than a decade ago. Now its Bakken shale field is leading the big retreat. Oil output in the state, home to the Bakken’s most productive parts, has fallen by more than a third this year — a bigger drop than many individual Opec producers pledged in their historic supply-cutting deal in April — to less than 1m barrels a day, according to one industry estimate. The cutback follows a consumption collapse, triggered by the Covid-19 crisis, that saw US oil prices crash to less than zero last month. Despite recovering to about $26 a barrel, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark is still down more than half since the start of the year. As a result, total US oil production is expected to drop by up to 3m barrels a day from a high near 13m b/d a few months ago, according to analysts. 

OPEC Basket: $22.40

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$23,72	5/8/2020	05/08/2019	05/08/2018	05/08/2017	05/08/2016
Active Rigs	20	64	60	49	27

Two wells coming off confidential list today  --

Friday, May 8, 2020: 25 for the month; 75 for the quarter, 302 for the year:

• 36591, drl, Rimrock, Skunk Creek 8-2-3-5H3, first bench Three Forks, South Fork, t--; cum --;
• 35670, SI/NC, Zavanna, Stranger 28-21-6H, Poe, t--; cum 147K in less than 5 months; huge well; a 45K month;

RBN Energy: Bakken rig cutbacks, well shut-ins to leave crude gathering networks underutilized. Archived.

The Bakken Shale is being hit especially hard by production cuts this spring. Crude oil-focused producers large and small have been shutting in wells and putting well completions on hold, slashing daily crude output by more than one-sixth. The rig count is down by half in less than two months — to 26, the play’s lowest level since mid-2016 — and thousands of oilfield workers have been let go. All this is happening despite the facts that the Bakken’s four-county core has some of the best shale assets outside the Permian and that in 2017-19 the play was super-hot, with crude production increasing by 50%. That three-year growth spurt spurred the development of a number of new crude gathering systems, many of which now face a period of significant underutilization. Today, we discuss highlights from our new Drill Down report on oil production and supporting infrastructure in the U.S.’s #2 shale play.