The Bakken Boom Rumbles On -- Irish Times -- September 8, 2019

A reader caught this and sent me the link. Thank you.

From The Irish Times, Friday, September 6, 2019: "North Dakota's oil boom rumbles on."

Global oil prices have dropped almost 50 per cent below their 2014 high. But here in North Dakota, oil is still the only game in town.

Named after Henry Bakken, on whose land the first well was constructed in 1953, the Bakken Formation is thought to hold about 7.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil stretching across western North Dakota, Montana and north into the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

In Watford City and Williston, ground zero of the Bakken oil boom, camp sites are full and prefab houses or ‘man camps’ built to house oil workers litter the otherwise bucolic countryside. Pick-ups with registration plates from Florida, Oklahoma and especially Texas dominate the streets. The typical, familiar symbols of suburban American life – big box stores such as Home Depot, Bed Bath & Beyond or Target are absent in Williston. But locals find a certain comfort in the fact that in their places are names such as Halliburton and Hess.

Thanks largely to the shale revolution, the US now regularly produces more oil month-to-month than Russia or Saudi Arabia. And Texas aside, today no other US state produces more crude oil than North Dakota, a state bigger than Ireland, Scotland and Wales combined but home to just 760,000 people. Over the past decade, the Bakken has become one of the largest oil shale plays in the world, meaning that when America came close to going under in the aftermath of the Great Recession that unfolded after 2008, North Dakota, pumping 1.2 million barrels per day at its height in 2014, boasted the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

Worth archiving.

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Bakken Economy

The "old" Williston High School is now the city's middle school. For decades, a beautiful E. J. Hagan indoor swimming pool was co-located across the street, but over time, it has grown old and not used. The city has newer pools. The plan is to renovate the building for new uses for the middle school.

A reader sent me a photo of a recent fundraiser in downtown Williston to raise funds for the renovation of the building. More on this story at KEYZ radio.