Divide County holds 19 percent of North Dakota's active rigs and produces about 3.7 percent of its oil. That gap is the clearest leading indicator in the basin, and if you own minerals where the rigs are running ahead of the production it is about to become your problem or your opportunity.
Production tells you where the oil came from. Rigs tell you where the operator is spending money next. When those two numbers come apart, the gap is worth reading, and in the Bakken right now they have come apart badly.
Rig and permit positions from Enverus, current as of 2026-08-17 and refreshed automatically. Production shares are from the NDIC county production file for June 2026 and are updated by hand, so treat them as a slow moving baseline rather than a live figure.
| County | Rigs | Share of ND rigs | Permits, 90 days | Share of production | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| McKenzie | 10 | 31% | 56 | 32.1% | Roughly in balance. |
| Williams | 8 | 25% | 25 | 22.7% | Roughly in balance. |
| Divide | 6 | 19% | 53 | 3.7% | Drilling about 5.1 times its production weight. |
| Mountrail | 5 | 16% | 17 | 17.4% | Roughly in balance. |
| Burke | 2 | 6% | 48 | 1.5% | Drilling about 4.2 times its production weight. |
| Billings | 1 | 3% | 0 | 0.9% | Drilling about 3.5 times its production weight. |
| Dunn | 0 | 0% | 41 | 19.9% | Permitting without a rig on the ground yet. |
| Stark | 0 | 0% | 6 | 0.3% | Small. |
| Bottineau | 0 | 0% | 1 | 0.3% | Small. |
| Renville | 0 | 0% | 1 | under 0.3% | Small. |
Montana is the smaller side of the basin in absolute terms and the faster growing one in percentage terms. See how the two states treat a royalty owner, which is where the real difference lies.
Operators currently on a rig or on a permit somewhere in the Bakken counties, most active first. Refreshed with the activity data.
Chevron · Chord Energy · Phoenix Energy One, LLC · Phoenix Operating LLC · ConocoPhillips · Devon · Enerplus Resources USA Corporation · EOG · Exxon · Formentera Operations, LLC · Hess Bakken Investments II, LLC · Hunt
The company on your check is your operator, not a buyer, and the two get confused constantly. Look yours up in the operator directory.
The extended reach lateral. Three and four mile laterals have made acreage economic that was marginal when two miles was the limit, and the acreage that was marginal is the northwestern rim: Divide, Burke and the north end of Williams.
The hearing docket says the same thing more precisely than the rig count does. On the July 2026 NDIC docket, Continental filed spacing applications for 2,560, 3,840, 5,120 and 6,400 acre units concentrated in Divide County, across the Juno, Upland, Wildrose and Hamlet-Bakken pools in T159N through T162N, R96W through R103W, and in northern Williams. Hunt and Petro-Hunt filed at Writing Rock-Bakken in Divide as well.
Units of that size are not incremental. A 6,400 acre unit is ten sections.
Expect spacing and pooling notices over the next twenty four months, and read every one of them. A large new unit superimposed on your acreage can create a second decimal alongside anything you already hold, and it will be a smaller one, because your net acres are being divided into a much bigger denominator. That is not a mistake and it is not a taking, but it is worth understanding before you are asked to elect anything. See what happens when a new unit is laid over your old one.
It also means offers. Acreage that becomes drillable attracts buyers before it attracts wells, and the first offer usually arrives in the window between the spacing application and the spud. That is precisely the window in which the least information is public and the widest gap opens between a formula offer and a real valuation.
About 19.9 percent of North Dakota's oil and not one rig running. That is not a problem with your minerals. It means value there presently sits in the existing production tail rather than in a development premium, and it should be priced that way rather than with future drilling assumed into it. It also means an owner there has less reason to feel rushed than almost anyone else in the basin.
You will see county level year over year production comparisons for the Bakken. Be careful with them, including ours if we ever slip.
The NDIC county production file excludes confidential wells. For June 2026 the county rows sum to 30.4 million barrels against a statewide total of 34.6 million, which means about 12 percent of the state's production sits in confidential wells and appears in no county row at all. For June 2025 that gap was almost nothing, because those wells have since come off confidential status. Compare the two months naively and the counties look down 13.6 percent year over year. They are not. That is an artifact of the confidential window, and it biases hardest against whichever county has the most new wells, which is exactly the county you would be trying to read.
Shares are safer than levels. Rig counts are safer than both.
Send us the legal description. We will tell you what is filed near you, whether a spacing application already covers your acreage, what we think the interest is worth, and whether we would wait. Free, no obligation, and if the answer is to sit tight we will say so.
Get a Free Valuation Ask a LandmanRig counts, permit counts and operator names come from Enverus and refresh with our activity data, currently 2026-08-17. Production shares are a hand entered baseline from the NDIC county production file for June 2026 and do not refresh automatically. Docket detail is from the July 2026 NDIC hearing docket and is a point in time observation. Figures move; the reasoning does not. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, and we buy in these counties, so read this as coming from an interested party and check the sources.