Regina– North Dakota is on an uptick, according to Tim Nesheim, who spoke on behalf of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. Nesheim gave the state’s update to the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference on May 3 in Regina.
There are now about 50 drilling rigs working in the state. That’s almost double the 27 that were working a year ago. A few years ago, that number was around 190 active drilling rigs.
“Over the past year our rig count has been steadily climbing as prices partially rebound,” he said.
Of those, all but one are drilling in the core Bakken area.
If oil prices stay where they are at, the state expects the rig count to climb.
Rig efficiency has increased. About six or seven years ago, it would take about 40 days to drill a horizontal Bakken or Three Forks well. Nesheim said, “Now that same rig is going to be able to drill that well in less than 20 days. So with 50 drilling rigs, we’re going to be able to drill about 80 new horizontal Bakken/Three Forks wells a month, whereas if we had 50 drilling rigs with the efficiency of six years ago, that would only be 30 wells a month.
“To get back to increase our production in North Dakota, we’re not going to need as many rigs. Part of that is due to increases in technology and efficiency. Part of that is from shifting from doing one well to on a spacing unit hold a lease, to doing multi-well pad drilling, where that one rig sits on a pad and drills up to a dozen wells, or more.”
With regards to oil production, the state peaked in 2014-2015 at around 1.2 million barrels per day. Oil production
has stabilized in recent months around one million barrels of oil per day. That being said, the numbers are on something of a roller coaster ride, fluctuating tens of thousands of barrels per day month to month. The state expects production to remain around one million barrels per day.
Looking ahead, the state expects steady to declining production until 2018. The rig count and frac crews are expected to climb or remain steady.
There are now over 13,500 producing oil wells in North Dakota, mostly Bakken/Three Forks wells. The state’s drilled and uncompleted wells has dropped from over 1,100 wells to under 800. “That’s due to the higher prices and getting prices up over US$50 per barrel for WTI,” he said.
Statewide, they are now capturing about 89 per cent of natural gas produced.
There are job fairs being held in western North Dakota. “There’s work in North Dakota again,” he said, adding there’s housing available now.
For every barrel of oil, 1.5 barrels of water is produced. Recently produced maps show good places to drill disposal wells. They are using the Inyan Kara sandstone for disposal wells. That formation is shallower than the Bakken, but deeper than potable water aquifers. Some disposal wells can take as much as 5,000 barrels of water per day.
Their geologists are also looking at the Red River formation, which comes in after the Bakken and Three Forks (what Saskatchewan calls the Torquay) formations as the third-highest producing unit. This formation, which is a self-sourced petroleum system, may have generated as much as 60 billion barrels of oil equivalent in western North Dakota alone.
The state has recently spent US$16 million on an update to its core lab facilities. Their core storage space has now tripled in size. There are now three separate core labs, instead of one. The expansion and renovation was completed in 2016.
