Williston Wire -- January 22, 2015

Williston wire website. 

Jobs fairs announced.

Oil drilling intensifies in Bakken core.

BNSF announces expansion details. Previously posted.

Amtrak resumes regular schedule. The schedule for Amtrak's "Empire Builder" has returned to normal. Amtrak officials announced in Williston recently that the Empire Builder has resumed stops in Minot, Rugby, Williston and other sites. The schedule changed last year to allow BNSF to put a billion dollars into railway improvements. Now, officials say the brunt of the work is behind them.

Despite falling oil prices, railways remain busy. Previously posted.

Demand for electricity still booms in the Bakken. Keeping up with the rapidly expanding electrical demand in the Bakken has been no easy task for electric utilities. "With utilities, we like to do long-range planning. We like 10 to 20 year load forecasting and building large generating units that are meant to turn on and run at the highest efficiency. That's the ideal world," says Dale Niezwaag, senior legislative representative with Basin Electric Power Cooperative. Those standards, however, haven't been applicable during the past few years in the Bakken region. "We've run into the oil and gas industry where they want electricity tomorrow, no matter what the cost," Niezwaag relates. "They just want us to get it done because time is money and they want production to start."

Bakken person of the year: Jon McCreary, owner of JMAC Resources.

McCreary, who grew up on a farm in the Columbian Basin Irrigation Project in a giving family, learned what it meant to 'give to those in need' at a young age. His parents befriended people that others avoided, served their church and gave to people in need. He graduated college with degrees in accounting and finance and later became the Chief Financial Officer of a publicly traded commercial bank, but his goal and ambition was to go back to his independent roots and exercise his entrepreneurial skills while running his own company.

McCreary fulfilled that goal in 2007 when he purchased JMAC Resources. Within his first year of ownership he tripled the company's sales and JMAC Resources has steadily grown in service areas, continually meeting the need of the marketplace ever since.