New Yorker Article on the Bakken

"Anonymous" send me a link to an article in The New Yorker Magazine, "Kuwait on the Prairie."

I have not yet seen the article, but will access it later.

Again, a big "thank you" to "anonymous" for sending me the link.

This is the abstract of the article, from a press release:

In the April 25, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, in “Kuwait on the Prairie” (p. 42), Eric Konigsberg examines the Williston Basin, which holds the largest accumulation of oil identified in North America since 1968. North Dakota’s head of mineral resources, Lynn Helms, recently estimated that the region could contain some eleven billion barrels of oil that could be obtained using current technology, nearly enough to supply the United States for two years.

Pete Stark, a geologist at the energy-consulting firm IHS, recently forecast that the output of the basin would double in the next five years. A hundred and fifty companies are now competing to extract oil from the area, which has a history of defeating oil prospectors. Konigsberg writes that “the amount that will eventually be recoverable is the subject of intense speculation.” Helms tells him that the Williston Basin “is still relatively underexplored and poorly understood in terms of its geology. It’s a subterranean detective story.”

A hundred and thirteen million barrels of crude oil were produced in North Dakota last year—a well-timed increase, as President Obama just announced the goal of reducing by one-third America’s reliance on foreign oil by 2025.

The oil in the Williston Basin has been unlocked with new technologies, including the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Bud Brigham, the founder of Brigham Exploration, one of the most successful oil companies in North Dakota, tells Konigsberg that plays for oil throughout the rest of the country are being slowed down by concerns that fracking accidents have contaminated drinking water. “There are some legitimate risks to simply getting frack chemicals to the well,” Helms tells Konigsberg. But, he says, because the fracturing takes place one and three-quarters of a mile below the aquifers, the risk of underground contamination is “as close to scientifically impossible as anything can be said to be.”

The oil boom has revitalized North Dakota’s economy; the state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, 3.7 per cent, and many residents of struggling agricultural communities have made a fortune selling mineral rights. One local man describes the influx of cash as a “changing of the weather.” Before the boom, he says, “the two families that had all the money were always the banker and the telephone-company operator.”