More Shale Oil Skepticism

Falls Church News-Press:

In January 2012, oil production in North Dakota hit 546,000 b/d, up from 342,000 b/d in January 2011, 253,000 b/d in 2010, and 187,000 b/d in 2009. With more drilling crews on the way, it is easy to see why optimists are projecting that millions of barrels per day will come from the various US shale deposits by the end of the decade. If we were talking about conventional oil coming from conventional oil fields, the optimists would probably be right --- but we aren't.
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.
Now a North Dakota shale oil well is not in the cost class of a deepwater offshore platform which can run into the billions, but they do cost about three times as much as a classic onshore oil well as they first must be drilled down 11,000 feet and then 10,000 horizontally through the oil bearing layer before the fracturing of the rock can take place. The "fracking" involves at least 15 massive pumps that inject water and other chemicals into the well. Take a Google Earth flight over northwestern North Dakota. The fracked wells are hard to miss as there are now about 9,000 of them and they are each the size of a football field.
There is still more -- fracked wells don't keep producing very long. Although a few newly fracked wells may start out producing in the vicinity of 1,000 barrels a day, this rate usually falls by 65 percent the first year; 35 percent the second; and another 15 percent the third. Within a few years most wells are producing in the vicinity of 100 b/d or less which is why the state average for January is only 82 b/d despite the addition of 1300 new wells in 2011.

The next few years will be interesting.