It barely matters that the view from the motel patio is a building site where a new Holiday Inn will soon rise. It's Richard Seeley's night off, chunks of boneless pork are spitting on the gas grill and the beer is good and cold. And he knows that before dawn he'll be back on the job again. Thousands of miles from home, Seeley is here for one thing only: the black juice underground that is catapulting western North Dakota out of the stereotype of lonely, broken-down farms and empty ghost-towns into a land of plenty that is soon to join the ranks of the top oil-producing territories of the world. It is a process that is bestowing great wealth on a few North Dakotans whose forebears, mostly immigrants from Scandinavia, homesteaded on unforgiving land here and whose own children held on to their sub-surface mineral lease rights even during the grinding times of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Not doing badly either is North Dakota itself. It was just as our current Great Recession was descending on the rest of the US three years ago that its oil boom was kicking up. Today, the state has an unemployment rate of 3.3 per cent, compared with 9.1 per cent nationally, and a huge $1 billion budget surplus. And then there are guys like Richard Seeley, who joined the stampede here for a piece of the action. Based in this motel in Williston, the main town servicing the energy industry and housing its workers – or trying to – he puts in more than 100 hours a week for Halliburton. For every month he works, he gets two weeks off.
"Williston is the modern day gold rush town," says Seeley, who leads a "fracking" team, the name of a new and controversial drilling technology that uses pressured liquids to blast oil out of the vast table-top layer of rock 10,000 feet deep, known as the Bakken formation, that stretches into neighbouring Montana and Saskatchewan. "If you ever wanted to go back in time to the 1800s in California, this is it."
Go to the link for the rest of the story. Incredible. Simply incredible.
A big thank you to "anonymous" to alerting me to the story.
A big thank you to "anonymous" to alerting me to the story.
