National Geographic Article: North Dakota Oil and Rail

Nothing new for regular readers, but a nice overview for newbies, and a "feel-good" story in general.

Link here to National Geographic.com.

North Dakota surpassed Alaska this year as the number two oil-producing state. It's thanks to fracking—the extraction of oil from the state's Bakken Shale formation.

But all that oil would be stuck in the Midwest without trains.

"Rail is cool again," said Rusty Braziel, an energy analyst at RBN Energy.

U.S. railroads have seen the number of cars filled with petroleum products jump 44 percent in the past year. A large share of that traffic starts in North Dakota, where more oil is being transported by rail than by pipeline. That might be expected until more pipelines can be built.

More surprising is that shipping by rail, which is costlier than pipeline transport and raises new environmental concerns, may become a fixture of the industry and not just a temporary fix, analysts say.

And it's not just North Dakota that's becoming an oil-train hub. A new combination of drilling and extraction technologies has oil gushing from out-of-the-way fields from South Texas to Alberta, Canada. With few nearby pipelines, drillers flush with petroleum turned first to expensive trucks, then to trains as they sought to move their product to market. Indeed, oil trains—a throwback to the earliest days of the petroleum industry—have become key to exploiting the North American oil boom, which has the U.S. on track to lead the world in oil production within five years.

And if shipping by rail becomes a fixture, we can thank a) the faux environmentalists; and, b) the folks that agitated to kill the Keykstone XL.

By the way, Don noted that the last time the National Geographic did a story on North Dakota, it was about ... well, I will let you decide ... here's the link: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/emptied-north-dakota/bowden-text.html.

Then, around the turn of the 20th century, the railroads lured settlers, largely Norwegians and Germans, into the void with promises of homesteads. Towns were planted everywhere—what one state historian calls the Too Much Mistake—in this isolated, semiarid region until, starting with the Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s, the farms faltered, then failed. The state now holds dozens of abandoned towns. Today in western North Dakota a 3,000-acre (1,200 hectares) spread of wheat is necessary for survival, and so the ground is littered with dead towns and empty kitchens where people once painted the walls a cheery robin’s-egg blue.

My, how times have changed. Where are the Poppers?