Driving around the oil fields of North Dakota outside of Minot, you’re struck by the fact that you are surrounded by thousands of square miles of rich, expansive farmland—green fields as far as the eye can see. But it’s what lies beneath North Dakota’s canola crop that kicked off a statewide celebration this week.
The state achieved a notable milestone: daily oil production has topped one million barrels for the first time in the state’s history. Viewed from a global perspective, if North Dakota were a country, the 1 MMBOPD achievement would put the state as No. 21 in the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) top oil producing countries.
“North Dakota could be an OPEC country of its own, in terms of production — it’s essentially the production of Ecuador,” said James Fallon, director of downstream energy at global information firm IHS, speaking to the Associated Press. According to the EIA’s numbers, North Dakota’s daily crude oil production is double that of OPEC member Ecuador.
The EIA lists the world’s top 20 oil producing countries (based on 2012 production data) as follows:
MMBOPD
- Saudi Arabia* 11.73
- United States 11.11
- Russia 10.40
- China 4.4
- Canada 3.9
- Iran* 3.6
- United Arab Emirates* 3.2
- Iraq* 3.0
- Mexico 2.9
- Kuwait* 2.8
- Brazil 2.7
- Nigeria* 2.5
- Venezuela* 2.5
- Qatar* 2.0
- Norway 1.9
- Algeria* 1.9
- Angola* 1.8
- Kazakhstan 1.6
- Libya* 1.5
- United Kingdom 1.0
*OPEC Member (Ecuador not in top 20 – 500,000 BOPD)
North Dakota’s daily oil output matches that of the UK, according to EIA figures. Compared to Bloomberg’s list of the top 20 oil producing countries, if it were a country, North Dakota would come in at No. 18, beating out Britain and Egypt, knocking Ecuador off the list. Yet another source of global oil and gas statistics, The Central Intelligence Agency, would put North Dakota the country at No. 21 in its World Fact Book.
The U.S.’s No. 1 fastest growing state economy is not looking to slow down. North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources’ Oil and Gas Division director Lynn Helms told the Associated Press that he expects North Dakota oil production to grow to 1.5 million barrels per day by 2017. With current oil production that surpasses all but 20 countries, and is expected to keep building, the state is looking to accelerate the growth of its oil and gas infrastructure. “Governor Jack Dalrymple said the state wants to boost capacity to 1,400 MBOEPD by 2016 from about 780MBOEPD now,” according to Reuters.
Currently, North Dakota’s economy is increasing at five times the rate of the rest of the country despite a difficult winter season that resulted in shut-ins and delays. In a June 18, 2014 article published by Bloomberg, Jonathan Garrett, an upstream analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in Houston, said: “As the weather improves, operators should have full utilization of all their rigs, and possibly additional completion crews to whittle down the backlog. I wouldn’t be surprised to see quite a bit of production growth over the summer. It should be pretty impressive.”
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