Why North Dakota's Oil Future Just Got Brighter

Oil Price ^ | 22 December 2013 | Daniel J. Graeber

[Smokin' Joe]

Powers Lake is a ways from Williston. I live a mite closer.

What has happened: tremendous construction, apartments, hotels/motels, houses, and highway--where 85 was two-lane, much of it is three lanes now, with alternating areas set aside for northbound and southbound traffic to pass slower vehicles. That has done wonders for moving vehicles along, and as the construction is completed, those bottlenecks have eased.

Part of the problem in town was the enormous (one vehicle in three) semi traffic, which has been alleviated greatly by the western bypass, which takes thru semi traffic completely around town. When you can fit three smaller vehicles in the space that semi took up, things get less congested fast.

It isn't that there still isn't a lot of traffic--there is--but that there is more room for it with the trucks taking different routes.

Shipping and storage facilities have been under construction since the first rail loading facilities were set up between Fairview and Trenton, and others have followed suit. More may be constructed as the need arises.

When you consider we started drilling Bakken horizontal wells in 1999 over in Richland County Montana and the play spread eastward, especially after the discoveries near Stanley, I'm not so sure "boom" is the correct term. More like a ten year period of strong growth (the Bakken in ND became officially recognized by the USGS in 2006 as having considerably greater resources than previously estimated, and by then drilling was already underway). That growth is not likely to be reversed like it was in the boom of the late 70s. (That was a 'boom', Williston doubled in size, and shrank back in the matter of six years when the boom died in 1982.)

In the meantime, we have seen license plates from every state, DC, and Puerto Rico in the parking lot at the Walmart in Williston, those who are going to stay have ND plates on their cars now, and those who travel back and forth for two-week stints on the rigs (not unusual, that) retain their home state plates with their residency there.

The area is still booming, economically, but the expansion is slowing down. There are still plenty of jobs to be had.

We already had the facilities to bring materials in-- otherwise, the whole shooting match would be backed up at a railhead somewhere.

Oil production isn't new to the region--oil was discovered in the fifties--and much of what we are seeing is an expansion of existing pipelines. There is a lot of new gas processing infrastructure, and there will be more,