Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire No. Dak. surges in oil output - AK. doomed?

It was bound to happen as No Dak is in an old time "gold rush".
Production surging, jobs everywhere, homes, trailers and apartments in shortage - shows what a productive society is capable of doing. Imagine if this could be repeated in other states?

http://www.adn.com/2011/10/14/2120858/north-dakota-close-to-becoming.html[/url]

Good news.
I can see this (perhaps) happening in SD, Wyo, maybe even Montana?

Depends on the formations.

We have some really big, similar ones up here they are just now starting to explore. Production costs (if the oil is even there)will be a big factor of course.

One of the big push-points for building the Garrison Dam was to provide crop irrigation water (Garrison Diversion Project) - but that never came to anything as the run-off would have gone into the Red River of the North,bordering NoDak/Minn. The Red drains eventually into Hudson Bay through Winnepeg Lake system, if I remember my geography correctly. The Canadians were concerned (probably rightly so) about fertilizer run-off and the mixing of organisms from two very different ecosystems. Even tho the Missori used to drain the same way, before the last Continental glacier changed it's course south into the Mississippi drainage.

Looks like they found another use for the water (cracking those rock formations and steam/pressuring the oil out takes LOTS of water!).

Incidently, I grew up on (and in!) the Missouri River 25 miles south of the Garrison Dam. My dad was the crane operator for 4 of the big towers there. My oldest brother once rolled a Uke (Yuke?)down the dam face during construction......

With every boom, there is a bust.

Agreed.
The nature of energy exploration, I'm afraid.

The boom is 100 miles straight east of here.

I haven't been to Williston in years and have no plans for a drive that way anytime soon. Guess it's really gone to hell in some ways.

Lines at the gas station, 38 minute wait at the checkout at Walmart, no place to eat or sleep, lots of traffic accidents, rapes, pretty much out of control. This is just what people say so take it FWIW.

Lots of people with money but also alot that don't have chit.

It is creeping this way and I really hope it doesn't get crazy here.

That doesn't sound so good, Sam.
Funny, how a guy(me, in this case) doesn't take those sort of things into consideration, when it isn't in his own backyard.

And a few other occupations.. One of which I am employed in.

I hear that.
A big part of my business is producing a product used for drill bit lubrication for oil exploration.

Up and down! Up and down! Up and down!

Tim, to be clear I'm not ragging on the oil business but there are negatives involved(with the boom) no doubt.
Rent/housing has gone through the roof so people with low to average income are chit out of luck.

However if you have mineral rights on property you might do okay.

I heard the other day that they haven't hit a dry hole yet in a big area of the Bakken. 100% success which I guess is unheard of.

I understand ya, Sam.
It was just interesting to me to hear some of the downsides of this thing, something that a guy can't appreciate unless he is around it-made me think about it a bit, if you know what I mean?

Yeah Johnny but you work for a good company and are big enough to handle large commercial jobs. There should always be work there unless things just get ugly.

Residential sure took a beating down there.

I can believe it Sam

in 67-68 this was a sleepy lil town with great folks, no one locked their doors, even a law on the books that you "must stop and pick up a hitch hiker at a certain degree below zero"


big money came during the pipeline, whores, pimps, crime, drugs, housing through the freakin roof etc. all the things you've described.


ahh for the good old days







yep that's right we had a better class of strippers here during the pipeline, it was heaven

Billionaire client might have something going on in Georgia..
Also a slim chance of going to Hawaii for some project for winter.
Meanwhile we're trying to get a roof on a church before the white stuff comes out of the sky... That's an interesting one.



I say welcome, welcome to the boomtown
Pick a habit
We got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the boomtown
All that money makes such a succulent sound
Welcome to the boomtown

When the boom busts, it moves on to the next boom. With these production numbers coming in, they will begin to play into the world market pricing. Stable countries and sources calm the market and some of the wild speculative dollars.

I'd rather see it coming from the North American continent than Brazil, Chile and Arab countries.

With the strong enviro wacko movement up in Alaska, they are delaying and curtailing a fair amount of resource.

My family lives just east of the boom near Minot, ND. I hear many of the same stories. I would guess that most people used to a rural life would be pretty uneasy when rumors of "man camp" developments in your backyard start to float around. 4,000 homes lost to flooding in Minot is not helping things either. With that said ND is by no means anywhere near what could be called hard times. Lets just hope everyone can deal with the growing pains in a sensible manner.

I have posted this before, but I went through the early 80's oil boom in NE Montana/ NW NoDak. It wasn't nearly as intense as now, but was pretty crazy. A lot of people built apartment buildings thinking they would get rich, then had empty apartment buildings and an expensive mortgage two years later.

At the peak (about a year and a half) you could walk into a certain bar in Sidney, Montana and be hired for a drilling rig job in 15 minutes, even if you had never seen a drilling rig before. I worked just long enough to get enough money to go back to college, because there were too many nitwits and hard-core dopers working the rigs. Can't imagine it's any different now.

The latest economic news is that China's economy is slowing down. Gee! Every boom has a bust, even in China--and that will bust the oil boom in Nodak, though maybe not as much as the last time around.

I have heard several decades of development cited multiple times thru local talk radio.

I remember when Woof Point still had the refinery east of town, that was a long time ago.
Housing is just now taking off here, very glad we bought a house last year and not now.


One of my farmer buddies said he wants to buy the Cattleman's Cut and turn it into a 'gentlemans' club. Russian ladies?

He just got married a year or two ago and I mentioned it might not be a good idea.

ya think.