North Dakota Went From 13 Frac Crews To 8 In One Month

It's sitting in the state's own briefing from August 20. Ten days ago. It ran right past everybody.

The Numbers

• Frac crews working North Dakota, July briefing...13
• Frac crews working North Dakota, August briefing...8

Same agency. Same slide. One month apart. Five crews gone off it.

Here's the part that makes it matter. The rigs went the other direction.

The state's own operator table has 26 rigs on July 13 and 33 on August 19. The same briefing lists the current DMR rig count at 34. The state's live rig list read 36 the morning this was written.

Three counts in one document, all pointed the same way. Baker Hughes still says 24 for August, and their weekly count is a narrower thing. By their published rule a rig counts only if it is on location and turning to the right 4 out of 7 days that week, from spud to total depth. Rigs in transit, rigs rigging up, and rigs on workovers, completions or production testing are all out, contract or no contract. The state posts every rig on location and drilling, every day.

However you count it, more holes getting started. Fewer crews to finish them.

The Number Nobody Watches

A rig turns to the right. That's all it does. It makes the hole.

A frac crew pumps water and sand down that hole hard enough to split the rock, and the sand holds those cracks open so the oil has a way out. That's the hydraulic part. The pressure does the breaking.

Two different fleets. Two different jobs. Only one of them gets counted every Friday.

Everybody watches rig count. Baker Hughes drops it and the whole industry reads it. Almost nobody watches the frac crew count.

That's backwards. A drilled well sits there making nothing until a crew shows up and pumps it. Until that happens an operator has paid for a hole that produces zero.

Rig count tells you what got started. Frac crew count tells you what actually gets finished.

And neither list counts the workover rigs. Those don't show up on the state's drilling list at all, and they're the ones keeping the 19,961 wells that already exist making money.

Right now this state has 8 crews to finish everything 36 rigs are starting.

The Math

July...74 wells completed in North Dakota, across 13 crews. Call it 5 or 6 wells per crew.

Run that same rate at 8 crews and you land in the mid 40s a month.

And it's tighter than that, because the wells got longer.

Average completed lateral in Q2 was 13,602 feet. All time high for this state. In 2024 it was 11,138.

Longer well, more stages, more days parked on that pad. Eight crews today cover less ground than eight crews covered two years ago.

What Else Was In That Briefing

• 74 completions in July, up from 65 in June and 55 in May
• 19,961 producing wells, an all time record
• 13,602 foot average lateral, an all time record
• 93 new drilling permits pulled in July
• 1,485 three mile lateral permits issued to date, 374 four mile
• Current frac crew count...8

Before Somebody Corrects Me

Three things, and I'd rather say them than have them said to me.

8 is not a record low. Last December was 7. In 2020 this state was down to about one crew running.

That count is a mid month snapshot. The state says so right on the slide. A crew finishes a pad and demobs and the number moves.

And July completions came in at 74, up from 65 and 55 the two months before. So crews were plainly still pumping when that work got done.

None of that closes the gap. 36 rigs starting wells, 8 crews finishing them. That math doesn't care how the number got pulled.

Who This Actually Hits

A frac crew is two shifts. Days and nights.

But nothing about a frac job stops at the crew. Sand haulers, water transfer, coil, pump down, hot oil, roustabouts, wireline, rentals, roll offs, fuel.

A modern Bakken completion runs well over 100,000 barrels of water, and the long laterals push past 200,000. That's trucks, that's transfer line, that's people running both.

And the work doesn't end when the crew pulls off. Plugs get milled out, tubing goes in the hole, and a workover rig hands that well over to production.

Fewer completions means fewer wells handed down the line to any of them.

Five crews off the board is never just five crews. It's everything that rolls with them and everything that follows them.

The Market

• WTI...83.40, down about 4 percent on the week
• Brent...down over 5 percent on the week

Talk of a Hormuz shipping corridor pulled the war premium back out.

North Dakota crude averaged 80.56 in June. In May it averaged 100.64 and sold 2.56 a barrel over WTI, the biggest premium this state's oil has seen since 1986. That's Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority, who said he had to go back to the 1980s to find one. He put the extra oil tax revenue to the state at about 29 million for that month alone.

Break evens here run 50 to 60. There's still room at 83.

Where It Goes

Wednesday we told you ten rigs went back to work in this state since mid July. This is the other side of that story.

The drilling isn't stopping. 36 rigs turning and 93 permits pulled in July.

Every one of those wells still has to get completed by somebody.

So this doesn't vanish. It stacks.

If the crew count climbs back in September, it was a blip and we'll say so.

If it doesn't, the pile of drilled wells waiting on a crew gets big enough that somebody has to bring iron and hands back into this state to work it off.

Either way the completions work here isn't gone. It's pending. The next Director's Cut lands September 21.

Who's Hiring

We run a jobs board for this basin. Real openings, links straight to the company, no recruiters and no resume farms.

See every open seat on the North Dakota board, or check what these jobs actually pay before you call anybody.

Field Report

Drop your county and tell us what your calendar looks like.

Frac hands, sand haulers, water transfer, wireline, workover rig crews...did your month get fuller or emptier?

Williams, McKenzie, Mountrail, Dunn, Stark. Tell us what's actually running out there.