Has the Economic Stage Count Been Reached in the Bakken Shale?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Bakken is one of the most active basins in the world in terms of number of rigs, with over 200 operating on the US side of the US-Canadian border. Production has rapidly increased from 100,000 BOPD in 2005 to 600,000 BOPD in 2012 in the state of North Dakota with the majority of production coming from the Bakken (Uptream Online, 2012). Greater horizontal drilling activity and a continuing increase in the number of hydraulic fracture stages per lateral have helped North Dakota grow its oil production six-fold in just seven years. The Bakken is a fairly tight dolomitic siltstone requiring hydraulic fractures to produce economically. The stage count for hydraulic fracture treatments averaged nearly three stages in early 2007 and increased steadily over time to nearly 30 stages in late 2011. Some wells have even been completed with 40 or more stages. With the ever increasing stage count, the question remains: has the economic stage count limit been reached in the Bakken? This paper analyzes the stage count versus the production impact of horizontal Bakken wells to determine if the economic stage count has been reached in the play. Wells are grouped and analyzed based on geographic considerations to help normalize for changes in geologic attributes such as natural fractures, reservoir quality, and net pay. Lateral length was also taken into account as varied lengths can impact stage spacing and interference issues. Analyses were run with various oil and well service costs to determine how the economic stage count may change over time. If the economic limit was not reached under certain circumstances, this paper analyzes possible scenarios to determine when the economic stage count would be reached. This approach should provide insight into how other unconventional oil plays can evolve in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".