When most Americans think about domestic oil production, Texas probably comes to mind first. But more than a thousand miles north, beneath the plains of North Dakota and Montana, another region has played an important role in reshaping the American energy landscape: the Bakken. 

The Bakken Formation lies within the larger Williston Basin, which stretches across parts of North Dakota, Montana and Canada. Development in the region is not limited to the Bakken Formation itself. Operators also produce from the underlying Three Forks Formation, and the two are frequently discussed together as the Bakken-Three Forks petroleum system.

The broader Bakken producing region has become one of the country’s major sources of crude oil. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Bakken region produced approximately 1.2 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2025, accounting for about 9% of total U.S. crude oil production.

The United States, meanwhile, averaged a record 13.6 million barrels of crude oil production per day in 2025 and remained the world’s largest crude oil producer. EIA has attributed continued U.S. production strength in part to gains in drilling productivity and operational efficiency across major shale basins.

Those numbers tell only part of the story. The Bakken is also a useful case study in how advances in engineering, technology and operational efficiency have reshaped how American oil resources are developed.

Technology Changed What Was Possible

The oil in the Bakken did not suddenly appear during the American shale boom. Oil production from the Bakken dates back decades, but large-scale development accelerated in the late 2000s as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing made tight-rock resources more economically accessible.

Two technologies were particularly important: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Rather than simply drilling vertically through an oil-bearing formation, operators can drill down to the target rock and then turn the well horizontally, allowing thousands of feet of the wellbore to remain in contact with the formation.

Hydraulic fracturing is then used to create pathways through the tight rock that allow oil and natural gas to flow toward the wellbore.

The combination helped transform U.S. energy production. EIA data show that horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were instrumental in the rapid growth of Bakken production beginning in the 2000s.

For engineers and operators, however, the technology itself is only the beginning.

“The basic concept is pretty straightforward: drill the well, complete it and then produce it,” says Adam Ferrari, a chemical engineer and CEO of Phoenix Energy, an oil and gas company operating in the Williston Basin. “The challenge is doing each of those things efficiently and repeatedly.”

That distinction matters because modern oil development is ultimately an exercise in economics as much as geology.

Longer Laterals Are Changing How the Bakken Is Developed

One of the most significant changes in shale development has been the continued evolution of horizontal wells.

A horizontal section of a well—known as the lateral—can extend for miles underground. Longer laterals allow an operator to expose more oil-bearing rock from a single surface location.

That can create several potential efficiencies. Infrastructure and surface facilities can support multiple wells. Operators can develop larger areas from a pad rather than continually establishing new drilling locations. And improvements in drilling and completion techniques can reduce the amount of time required to bring a well into production.

The Bakken has been an important testing ground for these improvements.

Ferrari’s company, Phoenix Energy, for example, has expanded its use of four-mile laterals in its Williston Basin operations. In 2026, the company reported drilling its first four-mile lateral “switchback” wells in Montana and completing an eight-well, four-mile lateral unit development in the state.

The industry’s challenge today is not simply finding oil. It is finding ways to recover known resources more efficiently.

Why Operational Efficiency Matters in the Bakken

Oil prices naturally receive most of the public attention. But operators cannot control the global price of crude.

They can exert considerably more control over their own costs.

That makes operational efficiency particularly important in a mature producing region such as the Bakken. Drilling faster, reducing downtime, improving completion designs and managing producing wells more effectively can affect development costs, operating expenses and the time required to bring wells into production.

It is one reason the oil and gas industry has become increasingly data-driven.

Efficiency is particularly important because shale development presents an ongoing operational challenge: individual wells generally produce most strongly early in their lives and decline over time. Operators therefore have to balance the performance of existing wells with the capital required to drill, complete and bring new wells online.

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