This article is mostly about the Montana towns and cities along the North Dakota/Montana state line: Billings, Sidney, Fairview, Bainville.
Data points:
- Jobless rate in Sidney: 2.8 percent; other parts of Montana -- 14 percent
- Fairview: railroad loading facility for oil; 100-car tanker trains
- Billings: more than 50 businesses chasing $1.5 billion/month being spent on oil wells in the Bakken
- More than 200 rigs in the Bakken; each well averages $7 million to drill
- Montana side of the Bakken: $1.2 billion/year
- Billings' Whitewood Transport, Inc (local trucking company): business has jumped 8-fold in two years
- Sanjel: opened new office in Billings
- Aspen Air US Corps of Billings, hauls liquefied nitrogen; sales have tripled
- RDO Equipment, sells heavy equipment; sales up one-third in two years
- Billings: not just the Bakken, but natural gas and coal
- First unit-train hauling crude to Louisiana left Dickinson, ND, on November 9, 2011
- Within 35-mile radius of Bainville, two companies are investing $500 million to $1 billion to build two oil loading facilities and a natural gas loading plant
- Businesses have to provide housing for their own employees
- 350 oil companies working in Williston
- "More trucks rolling Williston, ND, now than in downtown Chicago."
I hear the wells in Montana particulariliy Roosevelt County are in a shallower bed of rock meaning the well won't produce as much or last as long as a Norht Dakota Bakken well? Is this true?
ReplyDeleteI haven't followed the Montana oil and gas industry, so I don't have any insight on longevity of their wells.
ReplyDeleteHowever, my hunch is that it is much more complicated than that. I have a very good link to "factors that affect a successful Bakken well" on the sidebar at the right, and depth is not one of the factors.
The major factors are thickness of the formation, TOC, maturity, porosity and permeability.