Helms

Bakken sweet crude oil on Wednesday was fetching $66.25/bbl, prompting North Dakota’s chief oil/natural gas regulator to spend most of his time during a monthly production webinar lamenting the possibility of future slowed production in the state’s otherwise uninterrupted oil boom.

There will be no big decline in North Dakota oil and natural gas production over the next two years, the state’s chief oil/gas regulatory told an association of the state’s county energy officials on Thursday. Major production will remain concentrated in four counties: Dunn, McKenzie, Mountrail and Williams.

The latest monthly statistics for North Dakota oil and natural gas production released Friday present a good news-bad news conundrum for state and industry officials.

North Dakota officials reported Monday another monthly increase in oil and gas production, albeit modest, but they focused more on what is being viewed as a lack of progress in reducing the amount of flared associated gas at the wellhead. The most recent results were for May.

Attached to North Dakota’s regulations to lower the amount of associated natural gas flared in its booming oilfields are specific annual targets to reduce the number of flaring wells, volumes and the percentages on a year-to-year basis.

With mandated gas capture plans and better long-range communications with midstream processing/gathering system operators, North Dakota’s full-court press to greatly cut the percentage of associated gas flared at the wellhead is taking on a new life.

The oil/natural gas industry-supported independent chemical disclosure website FracFocus (www.fracfocus.org) was alternately praised and criticized by state officials in California and North Dakota on Tuesday during separate news media conference calls.

With the increasingly real prospects for the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issuing new rules for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and combating gas flaring on oil/natural gas operations on federal lands, officials in North Dakota on Wednesday said they are skeptical about the federal agency’s ability to oversee industry operations.

There are several other plays and deeper formations yet to be tapped in the Bakken/Three Forks shale play, and the industry is still trying to determine how many total wells it will take to fully recover all the resources in the area, North Dakota’s chief oil/natural gas regulator, Lynn Helms, said Thursday during the final day of the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck.