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.
The paragraph about menial jobs and importing workers got to me. Why can't these jobs be filled by the millions out of work right here at home?
ReplyDeleteI am always amazed to read stories about folks from other countries able to find work in the US but our own citizens complain of not being able find a job.
ReplyDeleteA lot of these folks don't speak English as a first language, don't have a car, don't have documents to help navigate the system, don't understand the American bureaucracy and yet they find work.
When I was in Williston, I was amazed that companies were bringing in workers from Thailand, Jamaica, and Brazil.
I could usually recognize an out-of-stater: they were wearing coats when the rest of the North Dakotans were wearing short sleeves and celebrating spring.
All seemed to be genuinely happy to be working.
unfortunately, no one wants to work the service jobs. Affordabel housing is the problem. Williston would be booming with new restaraunts, and retail if they knew they could get workers to work in them. The service industry jobs do not pay enough for a person to afford working for $10 per hour at a retail or service type job, and turn around and pay 1,400 a month for an apartment or $300,000 house. Hopefully with more housing coming on line, the supply and demand will diminish a little so the prices can come down.
ReplyDeleteYou are so correct. I think it's gonna get worse, much worse, before it starts getting better.
ReplyDeleteIsn't the lack of housing, infrastructure and other items often talked about in many ways a good thing? The lack of all the necessary items will slow down the process and stretch out the longevity. For example many talk about 5 goods years for the boom in Williston. I for one find this to be on the short side, but what that has down is bring fear to those that want to invest in the bakken. In addition, it has fear to the banks that might finance infrastructure. I am involved in an apartment that I only could obtain 12 year financing, versus the more typcial 20-25 years. Thus I have to pay off twice as fast, I need rents twice as high. The fact banks are scared creates part of the back log.
ReplyDeleteBut back to my original point, if the infrastructure bottlenecks the process and growth, then the development and build out will take longer. Which in turn makes the investment less risky.
Any thoughts on Minot and when it will began to become the "place" to be in the bakken.
Kent
I recommend "Basic Analysis of the Bakken Boom" which is linked on the sidebar on the right.
ReplyDeleteMinot will be "the place" to be when we get high-speed rail from Minot to Williston (30 minutes), running regularly throughout the day.