How many wells in the bakken shale

With industry insiders recently commenting that the Bakken region is likely past peak oil production, that infrastructure probably never will be built. Embed from Getty Images. Meanwhile, the petro-friendly government of North Dakota has failed to regulate the industry when money was plentiful during the boom, leaving the state with a financial and environmental mess and no way to fund its cleanup during the bust.

After the USGS announced the discovery of oil in the Bakken, the oil and gas industry moved fast, with both the industry and state and federal regulators ignoring whether what amounted to essentially new methods of extracting and transporting large amounts of oil called for new rules and protections. The industry could have restricted production until new pipelines and processing equipment were built but instead moved to rail as the next transportation option.

High oil prices motivated drillers to get the oil out of the ground and to customers as fast as possible. Moving oil by rail was essentially unregulated and would not require the permits, large investment, or lead times required for pipelines, leading to the Bakken oil-by-rail boom.

Moving large amounts of this light volatile oil on trains had never been done before — but there was no new regulatory oversight of the process. The industry waved away these warnings. Regulators have still failed to address the known risks for oil trains in the U. Fracking for oil also resulted in large volumes of natural gas coming out of the same wells as the oil, further contributing to the financial troubles of shale producers.

However, with no infrastructure in place to process or carry away that gas, the industry chose to either leave it mixed in with the oil loaded onto trains making it more volatile and dangerous or simply burn flare or release vent the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. In July, The New York Times detailed the environmental devastation caused by flaring in the oil fields of Iraq, where they flare about half of the gas as opposed to the quarter of the gas that North Dakota has flared.

Also in July, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California published research that found pregnant women exposed to high levels of flaring at oil and gas production sites in Texas have 50 percent higher odds of premature birth when compared to mothers with no exposure to flaring.

Flare from an oil well in the Permian region of Texas. Another major blindspot for the industry and regulators has been the radioactive waste produced during fracking. When the industry did finally acknowledge this issue in North Dakota, its first move was to try to relax regulations to make it easier to dump radioactive waste in landfills — a practice that is contaminating communities across the country. The fracking boom in North Dakota has resulted in widespread environmental damage and is worsening the climate crisis, given its high flaring levels, methane emissions, and, of course, production of oil and gas.

As major Bakken producers go bankrupt and continue to lose money while the oil field goes bust, who will pay to clean up the mess? Like most oil-producing states, North Dakota had the opportunity to require oil and gas producers to put up money in the form of bonding which would be designated to properly clean up and cap oil and gas wells once they were finished producing.

The Bakken boom made a lot of money for a select few oil and gas executives and Wall Street financiers. But as the boom fades, taxpayers and nearby residents have to deal with the financial and environmental damage the industry will leave behind. As DeSmog reporting has revealed, shale producers have not been profitable for the past decade, even though they have drilled and fracked most of the best available shale oil deposits. In June, oil and gas industry analysts at Wood MacKenzie highlighted this discrepancy in remaining core acreage between the Permian and the Bakken.

According to Wood MacKenzie, the top quarter of remaining oil well inventory in the Permian would result in over 8, new wells. For the Bakken, however, the analysts put that number at wells. The latest data is already available in our services. The drop in oil demand due to the pandemic has hit the industry as a whole, but the Bakken was already in decline, with the best producing wells a thing of the past well before the novel coronavirus reached U.

Legal challenges to two major Bakken pipelines, one old, one new, may shut down both of them soon. The play has single-handedly driven North Dakota's oil production to levels four times higher than previous peaks in the s. As of June , ND is second to Texas in terms of oil production and boasts the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.

Oil was initially discovered in the Bakken play in , but was not commercial on a large scale until the past ten years. The advent of modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing helps make Bakken oil production economic. The U. Geological Survey has estimated the Bakken Shale Formation could yield 4.

The name "Bakken" originates from a North Dakota farmer, Henry Bakken, who owned the land where the first well encountered the Bakken formation. How much oil does the Bakken Formation produce and how does this compare to what the United States uses? The USGS does not maintain statistics on oil production or oil consumption.

Energy Information Administration provides information on oil Does the Bakken Formation contain more oil than Saudi Arabia? Probably not. In , the USGS assessed undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas in Saudi Arabia at 87 billion barrels USGS World Petroleum Assessment compared to a mean estimate of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the Bakken formation of 7.

In addition, Saudi Arabia contains even more oil that has What are the environmental considerations of drilling for oil? Filter Total Items: 8. Peterman, Zell; Thamke, Joanna N. View Citation. Peterman, Z. Haines, Seth S. Haines, S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet —, 4 p. Gaswirth, Stephanie B.

Pollastro, R. Attribution: Energy Resources Program. Pollastro, Richard M. Year Published: Diagenesis and fracture development in the Bakken Formation, Williston Basin; implications for reservoir quality in the middle member The middle member of the Bakken Formation is an attractive petroleum exploration target in the deeper part of the Williston Basin because it is favorably positioned with respect to source and seal units.

Pitman, Janet K. Year Published: A resource evaluation of the Bakken Formation Upper Devonian and Lower Mississippian continuous oil accumulation, Williston Basin, North Dakota and Montana The Upper Devonian and Lower Mississippian Bakken Formation in the United States portion of the Williston Basin is both the source and the reservoir for a continuous oil accumulation - in effect a single very large field - underlying approximately 17, mi2 46, km2 of North Dakota and Montana.

Schmoker, J. Year Published: Developing an oil generation model for resource assessment of the Bakken Formation, U. Krystinik, K. Filter Total Items: 3. Date published: May 2, Date published: November 10,