$20 Million Scene -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

To all: Is this not incredible?

This is apparently outside my hometown of Williston, North Dakoa, the historic center of the eponymously-named basin, and now the center of the current Bakken boom.

It costs a minimum of $7 million a well, so one is looking at over $20 million -- and almost all of it goes back into the local economy one way or the other. Each dollar circulates through the local economy three or more times. [Operator --> roughneck --> McDonald's employee --> landlord --> taxes.]

If whoever took this photo wants credit for it, please let me know. If you have copyright to it and want it removed, I will do that, also, but I think there's a lot of folks that will get a kick out of it.

Williston, North Dakota, Winter, 2010 - 2011 I believe that in the distance, one can make out even more rigs. Notice that beautiful ribbon of highway off to the right. It's very possible my dad was involved in the building and/or maintenance of that highway if it's not a state highway. Some of the best years my Dad says he had was when he was a county commissioner. At that time, when I was 12 years or so, he hired me as a "community organizer" to knock on doors and ask folks to get out and vote. Even if they didn't want to vote for my Dad, he wanted them to vote anyway. He paid my siblings and me ten cents for every door we knocked on. He kept track of the number of doors we knocked on by the number of little paper announcements we brought back with us. I understand that one of my siblings would put her stack of announcements behind someone's hedge.