Tight oil production fell by 2% m-o-m in North Dakota in December, to 1.1 million b/d.

But the number of rigs drilling horizontal wells has tripled from the lows in 2020, and now a small growth in output is likely. More in our latest post on this basin.

This article contains still images from the interactive dashboards available in the original blog post. To follow the instructions in this article, please use the interactive dashboards. Furthermore, they allow you to uncover other insights as well.

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These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 17,045 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2001 onward, through December.

Total production

Oil production in North Dakota from horizontal wells fell by 2% m-o-m (and 6% y-o-y), to 1.09 million b/d in December. Natural gas output dropped by the same percentage to just below 3.0 Bcf/d.

Supply projection

Drilling & completion activity has further increased in the past month, and 29 rigs were drilling horizontal wells as of last week (according to Baker Hughes). We now also project in this basin some growth ahead, all else being equal (from our Supply Projection dashboard😞

Horizontal rig count and tight oil outlook in North Dakota, based on the current rig count and well/rig productivity.

The top chart displays the horizontal rig count over time, while the bottom one plots the total historical and projected oil production from existing and future horizontal wells. The latter reveals that a somewhat higher output level than can be sustained than is currently being produced, with these 29 active rigs.

Drilled but UnCompleted wells

The DUC count has fallen in the last 2 years, from over 700 in January 2020 to about 500 in December:

DUC inventory in the 4 core Bakken counties, colored by county. Only includes Hz. wells with a spud date after 2018. Permit Activity

Continental Resources, the leading oil producer in this state, was responsible for over 20% of all approved permits for new horizontal wells since the beginning of last year:

Operator ranking by permits. Permits for new horizontal wells since 2021–01, excluding cancelled permits. Top operators

The final tab shows the production history and location of the top 15 operators in North Dakota. Continental Resources was only 10% below it’s historical output record in December.

Finally

Next week we will have a new post on the Permian, for which we already have December production data in our subscription services.

Sources

For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• DMR of North Dakota. These presentations only show the production from horizontal wells; a small amount (about 40 kbo/d) is produced from conventional vertical wells.
• FracFocus.org

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