The Bakken Resonates In Washington State

This link was posted among other links earlier, but it's such a great story, I don't want it to get lost. A reader sent it to me: thank you.

The headline: oil boom in center of country resonates on Washington shores.

The arrival in Tacoma last week of a 103-car train from North Dakota was a sign of just how swiftly the sudden abundance of oil in this country is shifting business even in an area 1,200 miles distant from the booming oil fields.

The first few paragraphs:

When recent headlines proclaimed that the United States was poised to become the world's largest oil producer by 2017, the import of that news may have seemed distant and abstract. Yes, the oil fields of North Dakota, Montana and Texas are alive with new activity, but for Northwest residents, the effects are not something they see every day.

That fact is quickly changing in businesses from Olympia to the Canadian border. The arrival in Tacoma last week of a 103-car train from North Dakota was a sign of just how swiftly the sudden abundance of oil in this country is shifting business even 1,200 miles away from the booming oil fields.

That BNSF Railway train was the first of what will ultimately become weekly trains bringing oil to Tacoma from the new oil fields opened up by hydraulic-fracturing technology in the country's northern Great Plains.

The train's arrival and the construction of a new $8 million rail yard at the Tacoma Tideflats refinery of U.S. Oil and Refining is indicative of a shift in the source of crude shipments to Puget Sound refineries.

So many story lines.  One could start with the naysayers back in 2007 but will let that go.