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Bakken boom
Williston, North Dakota - Thursday, June 13, 2013
by:Timothy W. Shire

Tuesday, June 11, 2013 we left Tompkins Saskatchewan with a vague plan to head into the United States where gasoline prices run about eighty some cents a litre instead of the outrageous $1.30 + we have been seeing in Saskatchewan and the $1.40 in B.C. and Manitoba that make one’s head spin. A quick look at our maps sent us through Moose Jaw down to Weyburn and then south to the Fortuna border crossing. It was as we closed in on Weyburn, that we realised that this is not the same little old sleepy prairie town that W. O. Mitchell wrote about, or the one in which Tommy Douglas made his mark as a United Church minister. It is one single word and it is at every turn and move around the city, oil. The service companies and drilling process south of Weyburn is simply something I was not prepared for. As we drove on southward, the well heads became more numerous, the batteries and pumps fill the landscape. What is going on?

Now we all don’t live in a bubble, we have all heard that there is a remarkable oil production surge in this part of Saskatchewan, but who would have thought it was this big a deal.

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In 1953 east of Williston an oil formation was found far beneath the surface, actually about two full miles below the surface and it was named after a North Dakota farmer, Henry Bakken. The formation has a shale top and bottom with a dolomite composition in the interior. All of it, from top to bottom contains oil, but the holes in the shale and dolomite are really microscopic and dense enough to prevent normal oil recovery operations to be undertaken. So the formation, which is under western North Dakota, Eastern Montana and Southwestern Saskatchewan, has a considerable amount of oil, that resource was simply not accessible. The advances in both drilling and oil recovery have been moving along dramatically and the time has come to produce the oil in the Bakken formation. (The press and oil industry refer to this as the “Bakken Play”)

The picture above right, was taken in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Williston. There is a special heavy truck parking area complete with air conditioned privies, the bustle in and out of that parking lot, 24 hours a day, has to be seen to be believed. Dirty pickups hustling in on a mission, all manner of service company trucks of all kinds, cranes, a constant rush of passenger traffic, this is what a boom looks like.

That battery with four large pumps working side by side at the top of this page, is just on the North side of Williston. What the oil industry came up with is lateral drilling. Go down the two miles, then whip-stock horizontally through the formation. It is already naturally fractured vertically and with a little more help, that difficult problem of the small porosity is overcome and the oil trapped in the formation can be pumped out with big pumps miles away.

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While we thought the development south of Weyburn was unusual, it was a total shock to see the fields of pumps populating the North Dakota landscape from the border to Williston and well beyond that ,toward Dickenson. This kind of economic explosion does not happen often in history. Off hand, we can think of the San Francisco gold rush, the Klondike and amazing development of factories in industrial revolution Britain. We have all heard stories of the Fort McMurray phenomena. Well, here is what it looks like in the open prairie. Licence plates from almost every state in the union can be seen in Williston parking lots and that Wal-Mart is a shambles, the most chaotic retail store you would ever see and that’s simply because getting and keeping employees is a monumental task, one that most Williston businesses are losing.

Then there is the enormous task of housing thousands and thousands of workers. As we drove out of Williston and then turned toward Minot, huge colonies of temporary house sit in the country side. Some are multi-storied, others are dorms and absolutely everywhere you look, there are people working, heavy machinery building roads, clearing right of way for pipelines, setting up oil batteries and backhoes peaceful digging away for reasons only their operators know.

The highways are orderly, but clogged with trucks and service equipment of confusing kinds. Whole fields of semi-tanker units sit along the highway, the tankers are small diameter chemical carriers and flatbeds heading back and forth loaded, or empty, rushing equipment and supplies to rigs and crews.

Because the rigs are big, to handle the deep wells, the drill stem on the flat beds looks more like pipeline pipe then drill stem. The rigs sit in large drill sites working far out into the area around them, surrounded by circulation tanks, pipe and service trucks.
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If you look at the sources cited with this story, you will discover that the geologists seem as bad with predicting things as economists. The oil expected to be recovered from this field is from three billion barrels to 300 billion barrels. But, almost all expect this production to continue for at least fifty years. The current production from the area has exceeded each years predictions considerably as they are moving upward beyond the 440,000 barrels produced each year.

The real crunch is that the way the United States organised its oil system, the design was to have crude arrive from Saudi Arabia and be refined in the gulf area of Texas. Now the country’s ability to produce its own oil, the refineries are in the wrong place and those hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are going to market in unit rail trains. Railroads in North America are now into their biggest profits ever. You, see it costs about $30 a barrel to move oil from the Alberta tar sands and the Bakken area to the gulf coast. Pipelines are now considered a dirty word but the Bakken production is just as much hampered by the lack of a pipeline delivery system as are the oil sands. No wonder Microsoft’s Bill Gates is now the single largest stock holder of CN stock, owning some 10% of the company.

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