Posted on 10/17/2013 5:15:28 AM PDT by thackney
North Dakota's rapidly rising oil output continues to defy the sceptics, who have predicted that production would stop growing as declining output from existing wells offsets extra production from new drilling.
Oil production soared to 911,000 barrels per day in August, up more than 200,000 bpd compared with the same month last year, the state's Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) said this week.
Production is on course to hit 1 million bpd by the end of the year or early 2014, according to the DMR.
By the end of August, 9,452 wells were in production. But another 450 had been drilled and were awaiting fracturing and completion.
Completions are running at about 1.5 times the threshold needed to maintain production, the DMR wrote in its monthly statement, which implies output will continue rising in the next few months as crews work through the backlog.
Shale sceptics have been confidently predicting since at least 2010, when output was below 300,000 bpd, that production would peak.
Only the DMR has struck a defiant and lonely optimistic note. In 2012 DMR projected output would plateau somewhere between 700,000 and 1.2 million bpd between 2015 and 2025, based on a total of up to 40,000 wells in the thermally mature part of the shale play.
Many out-of-state analysts, including leading energy consultancies, criticised those projections as overly positive. Now they appear conservative. So why did the sceptics get it so wrong?...
...tremendous variability in output from wells drilled into the most productive core areas of the Bakken compared with the less-prodigious outlying areas....
...The big upfront yield is what makes shale wells so economically attractive...
...many conventional wells are also fracked, sometimes with acid rather than water, or that wells were being fractured in the 1950s and 1960s with diesel fuel and napalm?...
(Excerpt) Read more at rigzone.com ...
Sections remaining in article at source include:
Outrunning the Red Queen
Why Sceptics Were Wrong
Manufacturing Oil And Gas
Ahhhhh! FRACKING! We’re all gonna DIE!
This is very helpful in understanding franking.
One Million barrels per day by the end of 2013!
The Keystone XL was completed.
Drilling was allowed on federal lands and offshore.
Energy would be cheap and abundant. Manufacturing would return to take advantage of that fact. The US would be an oil exporter. The US dollar would become a petro currency.
One thing the author did not touch on was the very shallow decline, albeit at lower production, which follows the initial decline.
This results in thousands of wells with decline rates of only 2-7% per year.
With this background, new wells can greatly add to production.
Thiis is the secret to unconventional production: long, stabilized production for many years.
Most of the wells I estimate are in the 40-50 year life timeframe.
Since this is in same zone, little energy is needed to recharge wells save future refrac or two.
Also, early estimates were maybe 320 acres per well. As typical of most low perm reservoirs, industry is driving this down to 160 acres per well or 2X the # wells
Thanks for posting this. It gives this layman a distant hope that this economy is strong enough to weather the current crop of imbeciles, and hopefully the new bunch will use this latent wealth to pull us out of this mess, as per post #5.
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