Not a good sign that the politicians’ reaction to the North Dakota oil boom is to spend like crazy.
Actually I think they have been very slow at spending any oil revenue. I think it might have been better to move faster then they did. Lots of people in ND remember the last oil boom - and bust - and don’t want to repeat the same mistake made then. This boom looks pretty long term even though some very local areas are having mini-busts when the drilling stops.
I saw a map of the western ND oil wells a couple weeks ago. It classified the wells into different colors based on the year they were drilled. The oldest wells were random on the map, the newer wells were lined up in what looked like deliberately planned lines. The map showed a pad with something like 6 wells total, some in the Bakken layer and the rest in the Three Forks layer. The point of this is the drilling locations seem to be methodically planned, and like once an area is covered there will be no need to go back and drill again. That is why there are localized “busts” - the activity has switched from drilling to production. Production requires way less people, and less local infrastructure. That is why man camps during the drilling phase makes sense.