That’s good data.
Of course stripper wells contribute. They contribute 5 barrels per day. That’s not going to pay the piper.
Global oil production is what, about 75 mbpd? Oil, not low joule NGLs or ethanol. Proper crude oil. Saudi Arabia is about 9.5 of that. Russia is 10.3. That’s 27% of the total from two places that do NOT do stripper wells. Did you know there are, after just what, five years of frantic drilling, more wells in the Bakken than in all of Saudi Arabia, drilled for 65 years? The Bakken is the poster child for destruction of the joules ratio of in vs out.
This is frantic, desperate drilling using millidarcy enhancement methods that KSA never has to use. They have wells that have flowed about 10,000 bpd for 40 years.
“If you’ve been reading pump and dump stock newsletters, you might be getting a different story.”
You must mean the news releases from Continental Resources, the largest company involved who own more leases than anyone else there?
BTW I do applaud the efforts of NDak’s geology folks to slap down Continental Resources’ hype, but they are failing utterly to stop NY Times hype or even Forbes, who have a reasonbly smart oil reporter.
I know of no horizontal Bakken or Three Forks wells which have been reduced to stripper status (in the current round of drilling, not those from the mid-80s which actually targeted the shales), and I have been working these since 2000.
That is a lot longer to get under 20 BOPD than the projections.
The tendency I have seen is for production to level off at between 10 and 20% of IP after a couple of years and decline more slowly from there.
I don't pretend to have all the data at my fingertips, but causing a panic would benefit some operators as smaller players came up short of venture capital and slowed down or sold out causing a sudden surplus of drilling rigs and service companies.
Oil prices versus drilling/completion costs can drive such a deflation of any 'bubble' present, just as we have seen in the housing market adjustments here.