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I think Tom Whipple is one of the most under-appreciated writers on PO...

It took the production from 6,617 wells to produce North Dakota's 546,000 b/d in January. Divide the daily production by the number of wells and you get an astoundingly low 82 b/d from each well. I say "astounding" because a good new offshore well can do 50,000 b/d. BP's Macondo well which exploded in the Gulf a couple of years ago was pumping out an estimated 53,000 b/d before it was capped.

Read it at FCNP



Dang, I didn't even say anything and I still had to edit it twice!

When you see the frenzy that is going on in that part of the country to make this happen you just have to shake your head. I find it problematic that they can sink enough wells quickly enough to ever get much above some number not too far from where we are right now. At some point...and I think this happens MUCH sooner than anticipated....they are going to run out of real estate to put more holes in the ground.

I also completely understand what all this fracking means in the grand scheme of things concerning oil extraction. Simply put we are nearing some desperation stage and to me it is quite obvious.

I recently found a historical table of average well production from the Bakken and the overlying rock in (Whatever) Basin back to the 1950s. The average well maxed out about 300 b/d, quickly dropped to under 100, and fracking got back into the 200-300 range. Estimates of recoverable oil vary twenty fold. I figure it's producing something like 2-3% of our oil supply, but it may not grow much beyond that.

Actually that 82 bpd is for *all* wells in the state of ND, including lots of legacy stripper wells. The state of North Dakota recently started tabulating statistics for the Bakken only (actually including the Three Forks and Sanish zones, but those are considered part of the Bakken system), and the latest barrel/day number for the Bakken is 142 bpd, a number which has risen from less than 100 bpd four years ago:
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/his ... lstats.pdf

And BTW, those numbers Preston mentioned from the 50's only got up to 274 barrels/day in February 1954 ... and that was from A SINGLE WELL. The Bakken never saw as many as 100 producing wells until 1989, and didn't hit 1,000 until May 2009.

OilFinder2 wrote:....the latest barrel/day number for the Bakken is 142 bpd, a number which has risen from less than 100 bpd four years ago...

The 142 bpd you cite really isn't much different from the 82 bpd that Pops calculated.

Pops' point is still 100% valid----the bulk of the thousands of wells being drilled into the Bakken seem to be surprisingly poor producers with low to marginal EROIs.

Anybody have the info on how many times more capital intensive a single offshore deepwater well is compared to a bakken well? Doesn't seem fair to compare them otherwise, and 500 times more expensive for a deepwater rig doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.

I heard Deepwater Horizon cost $ 1 M/day to drill, but then they pull out the rig and hook the subsea wellhead into that fields collection system and because the well has its own pressure. With fracking, those wells will only produce as long as the rig is in place drilling and pumping, I guess. Fracking is not going to leave stripper wells I would imagine.

PrestonSturges wrote:... Fracking is not going to leave stripper wells I would imagine.

Fracking and stripping are nearly equivalent, in some ways. What's the bottom end of a stripping well? Typically four barrels per day or so?

Fracking starts out only one order of magnitude above that level.

Pops wrote:I think Tom Whipple is one of the most under-appreciated writers on PO...

It took the production from 6,617 wells to produce North Dakota's 546,000 b/d in January. Divide the daily production by the number of wells and you get an astoundingly low 82 b/d from each well. I say "astounding" because a good new offshore well can do 50,000 b/d. BP's Macondo well which exploded in the Gulf a couple of years ago was pumping out an estimated 53,000 b/d before it was capped.

Read it at FCNP

The Practician wrote:Anybody have the info on how many times more capital intensive a single offshore deepwater well is compared to a bakken well? Doesn't seem fair to compare them otherwise, and 500 times more expensive for a deepwater rig doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.

What the Patrician said is 100% the deciding factor. It costs so much to drill deep water that piddling returns like 1000bpd don't even get touched, let alone those in the 100 or 10bpd range. If you are going to compare it to anything it would be a field where the pumpjacks are active because the natural drive is exhausted, most of these eventually become stripper wells trying to get the last dregs of conventional oil out. In Northern Ohio there are dozens of those stripper wells you can see as you drive past on the highway, the local producers haul it into refineries one tank truck at a time, often only once a week after they have accumulated enough to make it worth their time. My paternal Aunt and Uncle in mid Michigan have one of those on the edge of their property, they leased it to a producer and get a nice royalty check every month to supplement their retirement.

In any case 82bpd is still $8200.00 at $100/bbl so depending on the costs of drilling can be quite a profit incentive to the driller/producer. That works out to just under 3M dollars per year per well. Cry me a river, how much does drilling one of these cost again?

The Practician wrote:Anybody have the info on how many times more capital intensive a single offshore deepwater well is compared to a bakken well? Doesn't seem fair to compare them otherwise, and 500 times more expensive for a deepwater rig doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.

Whipple says exactly that in the next sentence.

The point is to make the comparison to what we - at least most of us, picture in our heads as a "gusher" of oil. To read the PR, the Bakken is sprouting gushers on every quarter section. The reality is that even the best wells start at only 1,000b/d, drops 65% the first year, 35% the second & 15% the third and winds up, as OF & Whipple say, around 100b/d.

Whipple says the cost is 3x that of a conventional onshore vertical well and quotes "someone" as saying the eroi is only 6. He also quotes the EIA as saying ALL US shale will peak at 1 million b/d in 2020.


It's better than nothing, but it definitely ain't a gusher.

.

Our politicians are talking like cornucopians buy nobody mentions that dometic oil production peaked around 1970 and has dropped about 40% since then.
The North Slope of Alaska only gave our supplies a small bump in the 1980s. Fracking has given us just a little uptick since 2009.

The reality is that even the best wells start at only 1,000b/d

No, wells with IP's greater than 2-3,000 bpd are becoming increasingly common.

Peakers have been dismissing the Bakken ever since it starting making news in 2007 or so. If I had said back then the Bakken would be producing half a million bpd in 2012, I would have been laughed at. Now that it's become a reality, peakers are still belittling the thing anyway, even though it's far exceeded what they ever thought it would produce.

OilFinder2 wrote:Peakers have been dismissing the Bakken ever since it starting making news in 2007 or so.

No doubt, they're peakers and you're corny, that's just the way the knee-jerks. You see squeezing out a few barrels at whatever cost as the triumph of human ingenuity (I guess) and peakers see it as scrapping the bottom of the barrel; reaching from the top rung for the highest fruit – i.e the very symbol of peak oil, right up there with tar sands and Macondo.

I'd guess – could be wrong, that personally I haven't said much except that the wells appear to deplete super fast. To be perfectly honest I was kind of holding out hope that this would be a big deal and that the good old USofA would get another shot at the "yet to find" and make a few more trips in the V8 4x4 possible.

That's why this article struck me, I didn't realize just how small the impact will be once the pipes are built, how fast the wells actually deplete and just how small they are to begin with.

I wouldnt call it being dismissive, id call it being realist. I frankly doubt these wells will last any length of time to make the peak look much different. The reality is that while it IS an important resource for the US, its not a game changer. We are going to put another small bump on the graph of US decline over the next few years. It will help, but characterizing it in any other way is being unrealistically optimistic in my view. Lately the MSM has latched onto this in some desperate great oil hope. It is difficult to see so much disinfo and wild optimism placed on this.

IMHO its just another case of denial. Another signpost on the path of BAU with no regard to the consequences of continuing growth in the face of ever increasing oil costs.

TheAntiDoomer wrote:{more waasted bandwidth}!

I think it's fair to say that is a post lacking in content, with no point other that to ridicule and elicit an emotional response.

If you have nothing better to say, say it elsewhere.

You have only been right about a small segment of US production and and even smaller one concerning GLOBAL numbers. You continue to believe that NOT OIL is Oil and you continue to believe that against most evidence to the contrary that Crude oil production is going to magically continue growth when by all factual measurement it has been on a plateau for many years.

I hesitate to continue bringing up Global Net exports or the latest reports on GLOBAL CRUDE production. I AM NOT REFFERING TO TOTAL LIQUIDS. That is a canard. Masturbating amongst yourselves about who is right or not is silly. Pointing at the Bakken as some sort of proof peakers are wrong is absurd, but go ahead and keep grasping at straws. I'd say that when we are this enamored with such a low EROEI resource it does nothing more than SUPPORT what we have been saying all along.

The continued lack of understanding of the long term picture is telling. I refuse to engage in the who said what..who was right or wrong game. We can all learn from what is going on. Hopefully most folks dont keep burying their heads in the sand.

a bunch of posts in this thread are heading off to the deleted bin.

see ya!

AirlinePilot wrote:You continue to believe that NOT OIL is Oil

Where the hell have I ever said that?!?!?

You're just making up stuff by now.

OF,you have posted here many times about total liquids as if that is OIL. Total liquids is NOT oil, yet you continue to barrage these forums with some delusional idea that total liquids increases means something.

Deny that.