kennyboy: By MONICA DAVEY
Published: January 1, 2008
STANLEY, N.D. — At dawn, people from faraway states huddle outside the Mountrail County courthouse here, the coldest ones leaving briefcases and books to secure their spots for the moment it opens. It is a peculiar sight in Stanley, population roughly 1,200, one in a constellation of isolated and, in some cases, shrinking farm towns along North Dakota’s wide open western edge where few residents recall a traffic jam.
The early morning line hints at the sudden fortune that has arrived: Oil companies, saying that they located what may prove to be one of the largest recent oil finds in the United States, have begun drilling all through these parts. Fifty-two drilling rigs were at work in the state at the end of December; a count taken in October showed that 198 new wells had been drilled in a year, state officials said.
At the courthouse, the crush of people, known as landmen in the world of oil, spend their days scouring enormous old binders of deeds, each trying to sort out who owns the mineral rights to land that once seemed valuable mainly for growing durum wheat or peas.
“It seems like God flew over this country, and a dart landed on Granddad’s homestead,” said John Warberg, who is being paid royalties for the new oil well on the land where his grandfather’s crumbling, nearly century-old homestead shack stands.
People here say the oil boom could be the answer to fears that Stanley might one day disappear, like so many ghost towns in North Dakota, where the population peaked in 1930. In Stanley and towns like Killdeer, Parshall and Tioga, oil crews have filled roadside motels. And schools are growing or, at least, not shrinking anymore.
But new strains have flowed along with the oil. Roads and water systems are being used at levels unseen here. The number of workers switching to oil jobs — the oil industry in the state expects to need 12,000 new workers by 2010 — has left some restaurants shortening their hours, county and town officials leaving positions unfilled, and at least one desperate fast food place offering signing bonuses.
A year ago, the North Dakota Department of Commerce began recruiting prospective workers at job fairs in Chicago, Denver and St. Paul. Marketed mainly to people who had once lived in North Dakota, the fairs even provided home-state food — buffalo meat, a dessert known as kuchen and chocolate-covered potato chips — to lure people back.
“We’re going to get nothing out of this except a headache and a heartache,” Ken G. Halvorson, the county sheriff here who has been elected eight times (and also serves as coroner), said of the oil boom.
For the moment, North Dakota, where oil was first found in 1951, is only a tiny piece — about 2 percent — in the nation’s domestic oil production, well behind Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and others. About 129,000 barrels daily come from North Dakota, said Ron Ness, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, but the numbers are growing.
The oil is being drawn from a formation beneath the land here and parts of eastern Montana and Canada. Named the Bakken, after the owner of the land where oil was first found, it was identified more than 50 years ago, but no one figured out how to tap into it successfully until recently.
In 2001, new exploration into the Montana side of the Bakken — an Oreo cookie-like structure of shale, a layer of tan sandstone and siltstone, then shale again — began netting crude oil, thanks in part to new extraction technology. By about 2004, with rising oil prices, companies began sending a few landmen to western North Dakota; in the area around Stanley, the boom took off in 2007.
Lately, landmen — some are women — fill the county recorder’s office, the courthouse hallways, the community room upstairs and even the jury deliberations room, save the rare day when a jury trial comes to quiet Mountrail County.
In a single month this fall, the county recorder, Joanne Stanley, was handed 1,200 documents for recording — most of them legal agreements for drilling rights on the land of local farmers, and more than twice what had been a normal workload.
nytimes.com |
