The Bakken Formation: How Much Will It Help?
Posted by Gail the Actuary on April 23, 2008 - 10:00am
This is a post by Piccolo, a petroleum engineer working in the petroleum industry.
The Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana has generated a lot of buzz in the past year. Reserve numbers in the billions of barrels, even tens or hundreds of billions show up in press reports and blogs. Now the USGS has weighed in with a comprehensive assessment of the resource. So just how much will this oil accumulation help the world's largest importer of oil? Is it time to relax or is this just another small blip in the long-term decline of domestic production? We'll examine these questions and others below the fold, using data from the IHS database.
Figure 1 - Location of the Bakken Formation in the Williston Basin, adapted from esask.uregina.ca/entry/williston_basin.html
There's more… (4214 words)
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Conclusions
1. The Bakken shale has produced about 111 million barrels of oil during the last 50+ years in Montana and North Dakota.
2. Total Bakken production is still rising, and producing at the rate of 75,000 BOPD in October 2007.
3. Because of the highly variable nature of shale reservoirs, the characteristics of the historical Bakken production, and the fact that per-well rates seem to have peaked, it seems unlikely that total Bakken production will exceed 2x to 3x current rate of 75,000 BOPD.
4. The latest boom in Bakken production is driven by the application of horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing technology, which has added about 70 million barrels of production in 7 years. Ultimate recovery of the already-drilled wells should be at least double this volume.
5. The USGS estimates the mean volume of technically recoverable hydrocarbons to be 3,649 million barrels of oil. This is roughly 7 to 12 times the size of already known resources.
6. Based on current production and areas likely to be drilled, the USGS estimate of technically recovery resources seems optimistic.
7. The Bakken potential resource, while large by US onshore field standards, will have only a minor effect on US production or imports. Using 2006 US imports and consumption for comparison, the Bakken undiscovered resource of 3,649 million barrels of oil, if subsequently discovered and fully developed, would provide us with the equivalent of six months of oil consumption or 10 months of imports, spread over 20 or more years. In reality, the reserves developed are likely to be many times smaller than this value.
8. The October 2007 production rate of 75,000 BOPD amounts only 0.4% of US oil consumption, or 0.6% of imports.
9. Per-well Bakken production peaked in August 2005 at 116 barrels a day, and was down to 79 barrels a day in October 2007. If the Bakken production history in the 1990s can be used as a guide, the peaking of per-well production may portend a peak in total Bakken production.
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