Random Update on the Bakken -- The Numbers Are Staggering

Play the video while reading some staggering numbers below the video:


North Dakota Bakken Gravel Hauling The narrative in the video, by the way, may explain why that truck driver was "unable to make it in the Bakken" which was reported about a week ago.

Some interesting data points sent to me by a reader who attended the recent Bakken conference.

Some time last year, it was reported that $1.5 - $2 billion was being poured into western North Dakota, and I've been using that figure for quite some time. Then a few days (weeks?) ago I noted: 200 rigs  --> 200 wells/month x $10 million/well --> $2 billion just for drilling and completing wells. What about all the rest: pipelines, railroads, housing developments, support services, etc?

It turns out that the new number if $4 billion/month. That makes more sense. Think about it. $4 billion/month being poured into four counties in western North Dakota -- Williams, Dunn, Mountrail, and McKenzie, and I wager that Williams and McKenzie are getting the bulk of it.

The industrial park for the Bakken is located 18 miles east of Montana, just north of the Missouri River. It used to be a town called Williston. It's now known as "whoop" as in WOIP -- Williston Oil Industrial Park.

The activity is moving to the heart of the Bakken: northeast McKenzie County. Takeaway capacity turns out to be the chokepoint in the Bakken; maybe more about this later: what it means. What it says about the Bakken.

Other news from the conference: Halliburton had -- repeat, had -- 7,000 job openings last autumn. Apparently that number has jumped to 11,000. I wager half of them will be needed in McKenzie County where the action is headed this summer.

Enbridge has job openings for 135 folks right now; will go to 200 job openings this spring. Enbridge is now doubling the size of their CBR facility at Berthold; it was built last year.

Details sketchy, but apparently a 3,200-acre intermodal railroad facility planned for Minot. It would result in 45 miles of new track. 

A Note to My Granddaughters

My hunch is that when you reach my age, some fifty years from now, you won't recall what a newspaper was. I know you have no idea what a rotary dial telephone is. You have not even heard of the IBM Selectric. I'll let you guess (no it's the name Starbucks coffee). When you are sixty years old, it will be Siri, apps, e-books, and used books.

And used books. 

I often say I would like to be in the Bakken, but when I'm in Boston, I think I prefer to remain here. For now, I want to be wherever you are. But in the bigger scheme of things, I no longer have a preference where I am as long as I have my library. (When I was in my young 20's, I had no preference where I was, as long as I was with my woman friend. She never wanted to be known as a "girl" friend.) But I digress.

Among the books I am reading now, I am particularly enjoying The Diary of H. L. Mencken, edited by Charles A Fecher, c. 1989. I picked up my used copy for $10 at a used book bookstore in Gloucester, Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

Almost every entry is a delight. This one caught my attention this morning:

The enormous proliferation of government agencies has laid so heavy a burden on journalism that it has imply broken down. It is quite impossible for any newspaper, however large, to report the endless proceedings that go on every day.

The National Labor Relations Board alone is sometimes carrying on fifty or sixty at one time -- not all of them, of course, in Washington, but scattered through the country. The newspapers, at the beginning of this riot, tried to cover the principal cases, but they soon found it impossible, and today they only attempt to cover a salient few. It is the same in many other directions.

The Washington correspondents now find it completely impossible to cover the departments -- indeed, they find it almost impossible to cover Congress, what with its endless committees of investigations. When one committee is on the front page, the others are forgotten, though meanwhile they may be carrying on very important work. In brief, the public can no longer find out what is going on. Measures of the first importance are undertaken without any preliminary discussion, and executed without any rational criticism.

Thus the power of the bureaucracy increases constantly, and no scheme to check it seems to be workable. What the end is to be God knows. At the moment, it is certainly plain that government has got out of hand, and that all the old devices for regulating it are hopeless.

And that was written on May 11, 1940.

When you are reading this in 2062, send me an intersteller, after-life, 4th-dimension GPS, tweet to @papaneartheorionbelt and let me know if Apple still has two percent of the desktop market. It will have 99% of the mobile entertainment device (MED) market.