Exploring Future Bakken Decrease in Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR)






Fig 1

In this post I will explore a number of different scenarios for future North Dakota Bakken crude oil production using an updated interactive spreadsheet which can be downloaded here.  More details can be found later in the post (scroll down to fig 12 and read the paragraph above that figure).  The new spreadsheet allows the user to change when the decrease in new well EUR begins and the length of time from the start of the decrease in EUR to the maximum monthly rate of decrease.  The earlier spreadsheet presented in my previous post had these two parameters fixed at 6 months after June 2013 for the start of the EUR decrease and 18 months for the length of time for the rate of EUR decrease to reach its maximum.

Cool Tools for considering Future Bakken Output

Webster Hubble Telescope (WHT) has a new blog called Context Earth with a cloud hosted server with some of his oil reserve models. See the Red Queen tight oil model 2.  This inspired me to create an interactive spreadsheet which does something similar. 

The spreadsheet is called bakken2.xlsx and can be found here on Google Drive.

One difference between WHT’s “red queen tight oil model 2” and my bakken2 model is that the EUR of new wells is about 280 kb in his model and 340 kb for my model at 30 years. 

A second difference is that my model allows the new well EUR to decrease at any annual rate from -0.1 to .99 (10 % increase to a 99 % decrease) starting in Jan 2014 and rising to the maximum monthly rate by June 2015.

Future Bakken Crude Oil Output, Oil Price, USGS Estimates, and Decreases in Well Productivity

Summary Chart ND Bakken/Three Forks Scenarios

There is quite a bit of optimism in the US about potential future crude oil output.  Due to the media reports that the US will become self sufficient in oil output, many Americans believe that oil prices are likely to decline in the future due to the abundance of oil resources.  This view may be too optimistic.

The enthusiasm is based on the success in the North Dakota portion of the Bakken/Three Forks play since 2008. The high oil prices over most of the period from 2008 to 2012 has made the high cost oil from North Dakota profitable. Bakken/Three Forks output in North Dakota has expanded from 43 kb/d in Mar 2008 to 719 kb/d in Mar 2013, a 16 fold increase over 5 years. The media believes these increases will continue, but the rate of increase is slowing considerably.

As a cautionary tale, consider Bakken/ Three Forks crude output in Montana (at link click on formation code in left most drop down box and type "bak" in search box, most output is from the Elm Coulee fields (all charts can be clicked to enlarge):