North Dakota’s Bakken Outlook: Mature Play Poised for Next Phase of Growth
By R. NEMEC, Contributing Editor, North America
(P&GJ) — Recent history has been kind to North Dakota’s Bakken Shale Play in the plentiful Williston Basin. After two decades of financial and technological investment, the rich oil and associated gas bonanza has produced a steady stream of more than 1 million barrels per day (MMbpd) of output since 2014. And best of all, boosters will emphasize that producers have been leaving 85%–90% of all the oil in the rock for future generations to extract, given improved technology and other factors.
Thus, after already serving up more than 5-B barrels (bbl) of oil and 40 trillion cubic feet (Tft3) of natural gas, the still-developing story is what is likely to come in the next 20 yrs of this extensive shale play’s life. Scenarios vary, but everyone agrees that what is to come could out-do the past two decades with new forms of success that will transform today’s technology and infrastructure.
Two analysts from Moody’s Investors Service and other knowledgeable voices are part of the chorus of support for a lengthening of the Bakken production. One of the usual qualifiers is how much and when added infrastructure and technology will be developed. Oil prices and technology, the analysts note, will help determine this.
Among the more objective observers, the well-regarded Bakken is nevertheless described as a mature play in which even if future growth moves beyond the current flat stage, the volumes of oil and natural gas produced will be far more modest than other U.S. basins, such as the Permian in southwest Texas and southeast New Mexico.
While supporters in North Dakota are counting on enhanced oil recovery (EOR) systems to become standard throughout their state, a couple of senior credit analysts with years of experience watching U.S. energy companies at Moody’s Investors Service are still a bit more skeptical about how significant EOR will prove to be in one of the nation’s outstanding unconventional oil/gas basins.
Moody’s Sajjad Alam thinks the EOR conundrum is begging the question of “at what cost” can the economics pencil out? At lower prices, the larger companies active in multiple basins will choose where to deploy capital and in the low-price cases they will go with the Permian over the Bakken, Alam said. At high prices they will invest in all the basins, he noted.
Alam added that the Bakken now is concentrated on fewer and larger players. “The downside of that is the larger ones can make investment decisions at a [national] portfolio level, and if they have higher quality assets elsewhere, when prices drop capital shifts to the [higher quality] regions,” he said. Conoco Phillips, for example, ranks its unconventional assets with Permian and Eagle Ford highest, and with the Bakken third because of its higher costs and lower margins.”
As continued to be documented in 2025, major U.S. oil/gas basins are gearing up for an expected runup of gas-fired power generation demand spurred by the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the U.S. and global economy. The Bakken Shale Play is no exception and its gas-to-oil (GOR) ratio is growing with associated gas supplies being more than 3 bbl-of-oil-equivalent (boe) of gas with each of its MMbpd of oil produced in the state.
Justin Kringstad, director of North Dakota’s Pipeline Authority told P&GJ earlier in the year that the trend is for the amount of gas production relative to oil to continue to move upward. Kringstad said it was above three for the first time in June, and gas capture was at 95.7% statewide when Kringstad was interviewed.
The second Moody’s senior credit analyst, Amol Joshi, noted that “Rising GORs and the GOR ratio in the Bakken and other mature basins should drive gas volume growth even if oil production peaks. Bakken’s relevance to liquified natural gas (LNG) is largely indirect though, since Bakken gas will first need to be transported via pipelines to the LNG export terminals.
“However, it does contribute to the overall supply/demand gas dynamics. Also, relative to the other regions such as the Permian, Marcellus or Haynesville, Bakken’s overall natural gas production is relatively modest and at much longer distance away from the U.S. Gulf Coast LNG export terminals.”
The U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) projections, which North Dakota officials think are overly conservative in their reserve estimates as part of how they view their third-party role, and North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) would agree that the Bakken is a relatively under-stimulated, unconventional shale play, meaning new wells in already drilled areas can help stimulate more cumulative production than commonly expected in a “parent-child well” scenario. It’s not clear what it means for infrastructure, but it certainly should bring added production.
EERC’s Kyoung Suk Min told a USGS conference in 2023: “The reason why Bakken operators have historically not seen much production loss from the parent-child effect is because their initial completion designs were small, suboptimal, and under-stimulated.”
Min, a reservoir engineer and data scientist, along with his EERC colleagues, authored a conference paper concluding that under-stimulated wells are the chief driver of beneficial fracking hits in the Bakken. The research team used machine learning models to analyze data from more than 17,000 horizontal wells, nearly half of which were determined to have been impacted by parent-child interactions.
Among the study’s biggest, albeit arcane, insights is the fact that the most beneficial frack hits were seen in parent wells with proppant loadings of less than 450 pounds-per-lateral feet—and that 83% of all parent wells in the Bakken fall below this critical threshold. The pros think this demonstrates there is a lot of future potential.
EERC’s veteran executive for industry partnerships, John Harju nevertheless sees a “flat trajectory” for Bakken production for the rest of this decade, noting that it will take strong upward oil prices and/or some meaningful technology or productivity advances to drive more production.
“Some strong price signals, however, could really do some positive things on the technology side,” Harju noted, clarifying that he doesn’t include EOR under the technology advancement rubric. “For us, EOR is something that we in North Dakota have been working on for some time.”
North Dakota has no real commercial EOR yet, according to Harju. There are what he calls a “groundswell” of pilot projects that have either been completed or are in the process of moving to final investment decisions (FID). The state this summer launched a $25-MM program to underwrite EOR projects, and Harju thinks the effort has drawn between three to seven proposals from the industry. The EERC is involved in several of those proposals.
Moody’s Alam thinks the EOR conundrum centers on “at what cost” can the economics pencil out? At lower prices, the larger companies active in all the U.S. basins will choose where to deploy capital and in the low-price scenarios they will go with the Permian over the Bakken, he said. At high prices they will invest in all the basins.
Today’s Bakken has the four “C’s”: Chord, Chevron, Continental, and Conoco, along with Devon and ExxonMobil’s XTO. To date, the Bakken had produced more oil in the past before declining to today’s levels.” Controlling flaring and encountering constraints on gas takeaway have contributed to production lag, but “operators have responded pretty well to the needs of this basin,” Joshi said. He cited ONEOK, Inc., the midstream powerhouse, as one of the “big dogs” in the Bakken, processing about half the production. “On the natural gas liquids (NGL) side they have a dominant transportation network,” he said.
Joshi also cited Hess, Kinder Morgan and Energy Transfer for providing midstream services, all of which are crucial to the Bakken because of its location out of the mainstream.
Alam thinks the level of growth is limited in the Bakken, even if there is some, compared to the Permian. Others see the Bakken glass as half-full,” not half-empty.
After more than 25 yrs of being a cheerleader for, and facilitator of, the Bakken production growth, Ron Ness, CEO of the North Dakota Petroleum Council (NDPC), is convinced “the best is yet to come” at the two-decades-old shale play. “The best place to find oil is where you [already] know there is oil,” Ness noted.
“Industry is driven to develop the technologies to unlock the next phase of the Bakken, after nearly 20 yrs of production utilizing cutting edge technologies. There is much more to come, the future is bright.
“[However,] production charts indicate that without technical advancements or higher oil prices that drive more drilling activity, Bakken production will begin to decline in 2028 or thereafter, and EOR or other technologies will be needed to repressure the wells and mobilize more oil.”
NDPC made improving oil recovery its primary focus in 2024, according to Ness, who led the effort. North Dakota’s legislature also approved several production tax incentives and authorized $25 MM for an improved oil recovery matching grant program for oil operators developing new technologies.
North Dakota likely will continue to be the third largest oil producing state in the nation, and oil production taxes should continue to account for more than 50% of the state’s tax revenue, Ness anticipates. He said the state is the “largest stakeholder in the state’s oil and gas future,” so therefore, it continuing as a partner is supporting technology and policies that increase the future productivity of the state’s oil and gas resources.
Moody’s Joshi agrees about North Dakota holding its current position nationally. In the future, he sees Alaska reversing a long downturn in production and other areas being revived, too. “Bakken is likely to stay a major region because there is a lot of oil in the ground, and at supportive oil prices, North Dakota should hold its position,” he noted.
Joshi thinks the midstream companies in the Bakken “keep responding to the producers’ needs” by investing in infrastructure. He cited the 900-mi. Elk Creek NGL pipeline serving the Bakken region whose expansion was completed by ONEOK in 2025, and his understanding that Kinder Morgan is considering converting the Double H oil pipeline to carry NGLs, as examples of the industry’s responsiveness. “The bulk of the takeaway transportation is still controlled by [Tulsa-based] ONEOK, however,” Joshi said.
North Dakota pipeline authority’s Kringstad also has indicated that the state’s major transmission pipeline, Northern Border, carries about 83% of the Bakken gas supplies, but the trend is for ever-increasing portions going to Canadian supplies. Ethane supplies also are seeing slight upticks that crowd out natural gas, he said. British thermal unit (Btu) levels were increasing in June, according to Kringstad, meaning producers want to shove more ethane into the mix for sorting out from natural gas farther down the pipeline closer to the major markets to the east in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
“The more ethane that is injected into the natural gas pipeline, the less space there is for natural gas,” Kringstad told news media this summer [2025], adding that if more capacity for gas is constrained in future years, it could cause limits of the Bakkan supplies getting marketed with the expected increase in gas demand for power generation and data centers.
Bismarck-based WBI Energy and Intensity Infrastructure have proposed eastern pipeline expansion projects for Bakkan gas supplies in the works to come online by 2030. North Dakota’s Industrial Commission ultimately will review and decide what gets built.
EERC Vice President for strategic partnerships, Harju, noted that in the university-based center’s “Bakken Optimization Program”, researchers are trying to provide an ongoing effort to lift recovery [per-barrel] factors on individual wells. “It is really geared to reducing operating costs by finding efficiencies that put barrels in the tank without increasing cost.”
He noted that the industry and EERC are contemplating doing a benchmarking study on lease operating expenses in 2026. This would look across [the industry] here and see who is doing what to identify some synergies that could be applied more broadly, Harju indicated. “We hope to learn from one another to the extent it is practicable.” He said the Bakken producers have strong interest in this.
According to Harju, the effort is focusing on innovative steps that will help hold the Bakken production at 1.1 MMbpd–1.2 MMbpd. “I don’t think they are the types of things that will push production levels up substantially, or for that matter, help us avoid a sustained downturn,” he said, adding that he doesn’t consider these options as in the realm of new technology.
The Bakken is spurring some of what Harju claims are “interesting” developments with longer (3-mi. and 4-mi.) laterals and higher proppant loads. As drilling moves out of the core of the Bakken, he sees the opportunity to add more barrels without adding to overall production costs.
“When we get out of the core of the [Williston] basin where 2-mi. laterals work pretty well, operators have lifted ultimate production numbers substantially, in the shallower areas, technically there will be totally less footage to pay, but the pay will get better.” He’s describing what the pros call the “non-core Bakken.”
Harju said the longer laterals seem to be making what he calls “very good wells,” and are allowing operators to contain costs. “The 3-mi. and 4-mi. laterals are some of the logical things we are going to see proliferating over the next several years,” he said.
EERC strongly supports EOR, and the state envisions eventually the capturing and use of more than 100 MMt of carbon dioxide (CO2). To put that in perspective, Harju noted that all of the state’s currently operating coal-fired power generation plants collectively only represent 30 MMtpy of CO2. Therefore, the state must be aggressive and skillful to eventually capture more than three times that amount and use it in an expansive EOR effort.
“We’re big believers in finding that synergy between our aging coal-fired fleet and our ultimate need for large quantities of CO2 for EOR throughout the Bakken system,” he said. “This is going to allow a lot of investment and incremental infrastructure. We need a lot of CO2 from sources we have not fully identified.”
New sources and sources beyond the state boundaries are what EERC and others will be looking at in the months and years to come. “There is a bit of a ‘chicken-egg’ challenge here,” Harju said. “We need to prove the EOR potential has real scale, and we hope to be doing that over the next 2 yrs–3 yrs.”
EERC has what Harju calls a “very large project” now in the advanced planning stages with Chord Energy [merged major Bakken producer from Oasis Petroleum LLC and Whiting Petroleum Corp.] involving 18 months of sustained CO2 injection into a chosen Bakken field. “That will be the first commercial-scale project attempted here, and there are various other pilots being planned for the Williston Basin,” he said.
Moody’s has not completed any recent studies of the Bakken. The two seasoned analysts at the ratings firm speculated on questions such as whether North Dakota will maintain its ranking as the nation’s third largest oil producing state.
Joshi said in the foreseeable future, the state will keep its ranking. For the future, he sees Alaska reversing a long downturn in production and other areas being revived. “The Bakken is likely to stay a major region because there is a lot of oil in the ground, and at supportive prices, North Dakota should comfortably hold it position.”
His colleague Alam doesn’t see there being a competition among states. He thinks there will be continued interest in natural gas and LNG exports and AI-inspired data centers. “We’ve seen gas prices rise a little bit since the past doldrums.”
Joshi said, “AI presents the sizzle but it is not as much of a needle-mover as LNG in terms of domestic natural gas demand growth.
“There is a balance between how much natural gas will be used, the number of new gas-fired power plants, and how much the renewables will take up, but I think the LNG export story is quite significant. We expect LNG exports to double in the next 5 yrs to 2030. That is the biggest growth story on the natural gas side,” according to Joshi.
For their organization’s part Moody’s, in the fall of 2024, published two white papers on AI’s potential catalytic effect on the energy sector. One noted that LNG and AI could provide a “growth tailwind,” depending on the removal of regulatory and social barriers. And for the question of where all the additional electricity needed to power AI will come from, Moody’s saw both gas and coal reaping the potential benefits.
However, Alam noted that North Dakota is not likely to supply some of the eventual LNG exports. “The Bakken region produces natural gas as a byproduct of oil production, so the total Bakken gas production represents only a small portion of U.S. gas production (3.5%–4%), and it is unlikely to contribute meaningfully towards future LNG exports.”
About the Author
RICHARD NEMEC is a long-time contributing editor based in Los Angles, California (U.S.). He can be reached at: rnemec@ca.rr.com.