Words From the Well Pad continued
Energy Corridors The North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources created the first-ever energy corridors. The term was used to describe a top-surface geographic orientation that maximized industry’s access to well sites while minimizing their presence on the landscape. Spacing units that once showed random wellbore lines running in all directions
and at different lengths transformed into more unified images showing wells running in unison in a single direction. North Dakota energy leaders utilized 1,280-acre spacing units to create a uniform pattern of development that helped with pipelines, electrical lines and traffic patterns.
Decline Curves With each new operational advancement in the field, every well has become better and holds more promise than previous versions. The advancements could be linked to drilling more precise wellbores or fracturing more of the reservoir through new technology or approaches, but either way, decline curves have been a topic since the early days of the Bakken. Operators, analysts and investors all like to talk about how fast a well will decline in production. The initial production rate (linked to a period like 30 days or 3 months) is continuously rising in the Bakken. Decline rates have also risen, showing that new fracking and drilling techniques are making wells produce more oil at higher rates over a longer period.
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