They will be drilling for as long as it makes economic sense to do so.
People who don’t live near or in boom towns/regions in the west where natural resource booms happen don’t understand how they rise ... and then collapse at 3X the speed of the rise.
The S&L banking scandal of the 1980’s (for which we taxpayers were bilked of $500B+ of money to bail out) was a result of the oil patch boom of the early 80’s. Everyone was saying that commodities (especially oil and gold) would go up and never come back down.
As we saw by 1986, this turns out to be a bad assumption.
Sure, no one can predict the future, but oil is over $100 when we are in an invisible recession, what will it be when this economy is moving again. The past also did not have China and India and one billion more cars on the road, plus huge domestic demand for petroleum based products! These are world changing factors that have driven oil rigs to every corner of the Earth - like Cuba. We have also been drilling in the US for decades. So it is very likely this will continue for a long time.
They are producing about 400K barrels per day in ND, which is $40 million a day in revenues. In a state that has very few people. The reserves are huge and the prediction is one million barrels per day.
Just like the oil sands in Canada - it will go on for a long time, and it will enrich us, and weaken our enemies only if we can stop the green anarchists and their leader, Barack Obama.