State sets new records for oil, gas production in December
By Neal A. Shipman
Farmer Editor
The Bakken was definitely rocking in the month of December as North Dakota saw a record production of both oil and natural gas.
“What a great way to end the year,” stated Lynn Helms, North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources director during his monthly Director’s Cut on Friday, Feb. 15. “We topped 1.4 million barrels per day in oil production and saw a big increase in natural gas production.”
According to Helms, the state’s oil and gas industry took advantage of the mild weather during the first part of December bringing 99 wells online while pumping out 43,442,924 barrels of oil and 82,150,203 mcf of natural gas.
“We returned to the days of gas production increasing much more rapidly than oil production,” stated Helms. “And our challenge going through the entire year of 2019 is to bring on more gas gathering and processing capacity.”
And those record gains, according to Helms, came even when the industry was self-imposing production in order to meet the state’s natural gas capture rate.
“The industry self-restricted oil production by about 35,000 barrels per day in December,” stated Helms. “They could have chosen to produce that had we had adequate gas gathering capacity.”
McKenzie County Outdistances Other Oil-Producing Counties
While North Dakota had a record month of production in December, so did McKenzie County, the state’s largest oil and natural gas producing county.
During December, the county saw its number of active producing wells increase by 56 to 4,383 with those wells producing 40 percent of the oil and 50 percent of the state’s natural gas.
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