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

someone has hacked Sam's account

that ain't him postin

AK doomed?


is Steelhead coming back?


welcome home Scott, I thought ye was buying a place down south

Randy, this is Fred's ghost posting. We are both dead but I can still type.
Sam just went to get us another Busch Light.



grin





You know what I wanna do?

Take about 10 or 15 acres of a (flat)pasture right off the highway and make a truck parking lot.

Lights, chain link fence, plug ins for block heaters and room for +20 rigs. Low hassle and I bet it would pay for itself quick!
Should always be a need for trucks even after the drilling is done.

Looking at your avatar??? Are you a Mexican Prostitute? There were a lot of them up here during the pipeline building days.

Yep, that's me.

I live in the middle of the Williston basin. It's nuts in a not so pretty way. We have about one person per week killed in a semi accident. A friend's kids were in a car that was run over by a semi. The sleepy peaceful town that most of us here liked is gone. Crime is up. The stores are not stocked. Checkout at a store can be a half hour. I can't get a routine doctor's appointment. Old folks on fixed incomes are losing their apartments to tripling rents and being forced to buy their apartments as condominiums at stratospheric prices. The roads are worse than shot. My wife now packs a gun. All in all rockin the Bakken is wonderful.

I do believe this run is a bit different as the global economy is bigger and most of all the drilling technology is radically different. The profit margin is so great that only a true global economic collapse will stop it.

The other thing that could stop it is Obama's EPA shutting down the fracking. I am sure he would love to, but the political fall out at the gas pumps is to scary.
Not so much perhaps in a second term.

I do not begrudge folks the much needed jobs, or the country the oil, but we have pretty much decided we are out of here.

Oh Lord let there be just one more oil boom...
I promise not to piss it all away this time...

Would not say it was the enviro whackos that did AK in on oil development...
Between Frank Murkowski as gov unilaterally giving up huge chunks of potential royalties to the feds and Palin changing the tax structure and making a horrible choice and policy on the gas pipeline I would say it was a couple that were not enviro whacos... just whackos...

I thought for about 3 seconds and decided to stay on the farm.

Oh yeah, wife came home with a chipped windshield courtesy of the Bakken. The entire experience just feels like sand in a bad place.

The problem with booms normally is you attract a lot of people who make money and then when it bust they go back to where they came from and the place that had the boom turns out worse after the bust than before the boom.

Lots of people I work with down here went up to AK to work on the pipeline and other assorted booms in the oil/gas industry over the last 30-40 years. They made their money, came back and started a small business related to the industry.

At least someone has a job now however.

Minature boom going on where I just move from in East Texas. Nothing as big as what's going on in ND however. They really won't see it as a boom because all the people coming in are staying in travel trailers, work 16 hour shifts and the few business that are around won't sell to them anyway. Local gun range/gun shop there had a sign out on the gate saying if you worked in the oil/gas industry you weren't welcome on the property and he meant it. Seen several such signs over the last 3-4 years. The few people who do get ahead own mineral rights but a good portion of those blow it all like winning the lottery pretty quickly. I knew a couple that owed $50k in medical bills due to stupidity (turned down insurance at work) and got $100k off a lease deal and bought (2) new trucks and (4) new 4 wheelers for the whole family and it was gone after taxes. In 3-5 years those trucks and 4 wheelers won't be worth fifty cents.

Another owner of the local gun shop told me they had lots of them that wanted to come in and buy a gun (rifle/shotgun) or put one on layaway while they were working because they couldn't keep guns on the company property where they stayed and they said no we really didn't want to deal with them. All they had to do was keep them on layaway till they left and they would come pay them off and go home.

Always has been that way in the west from day 1, starting with the fur traders.

I use to do business with the Hospital up there just after the bust in the early 80s...what had been the Radisson, was bought by some other company, but you could have a huge suite, with a jacuzzi in your room, as a business traveler for $15 to $20 a night...

The other thing I thought was nuts up there, was they had some Chinese doctor from HongKong, that could barely speak English... but drove a Rolls Royce in Williston N.Dakota..

don't see too many of those in Nordakoda...

I hear 600 bucks a month for a trailer spot WITHOUT WATER. Several friends are over there and it's like being on the moon. One guy managed to buy 20 acres west of Williston, needs to put up a shop with an apartment in it, plus a trailer camp, next summer.
The hope is to get a decent, select "little Flathead" operation up and running so that it's not Ice Station Zebra.

Would be nice to see all these people pack up and leave AK and go back south.

We are betting big in Alaska, offhsore.