The far reaches of northwestern North Dakota offer a wealth of space.
Green countryside.
Occasional rolling hills.
There’s plenty of room for the breeze to blow where it wants.
The tiny town of Stanley is no exception. Here there’s enough elbow room for folks to cross downtown’s main drag wherever they wish.
Still on the north edge of town, at the Mountrail County Courthouse on an early July morning, you will find license plates from states such as Louisiana and Montana.
Inside, tables line the hall with people parked side-by-side with their laptops. And in the County Recorder’s vault, they’re elbow to elbow pouring over old books.
As she stamps another document, deputy county recorder Jan Taylor notes, “I’m still working on day before yesterday if that tells you anything.”
She has a name for all of this company, “Landmen.”
“I’m from Baton Rouge Louisiana,” says one lady in the vault. They’re mining the old stacks of books for underground ownership.
“Pretty much a history of the land and the mineral rights, trying to figure out who owns what,” says another.
But there’s one mineral in particular that matters.
“People that have gotten oil wells have seen a life change,” reflects Taylor.
In these fields, there’s a gold rush of sorts. Just south of Stanley you will find pump jacks – what look like bobbing ducks to kids – drawing middle-western oil from the earth.
And it’s the oil interests that go to places like the Mountrail County Courthouse to find mineral rights owners in hopes of getting drilling rights.
West of town a few miles, one of those pump jacks hums along. “That’s an oil well,” says Stanley Mayor Mike Hynek with a chuckle.
Hynek holds some mineral rights on this well. Land he farms, now also offers a new cash-crop through lease and royalty payments. “But yeah, five years ago, no two years ago, I wouldn’t of believed it. Things have changed dramatically,” says the Hynek.
This day it becomes clear rather quickly how dramatically things have changed. Unexpected visitors suddenly show up in this arguably remote spot on the northern plains.
Mayor Hynek reaches out to shake hands with the visitor.
“We’re just out to your place,” says Betty Hersel.
She traveled from Boise, Idaho for a nearby reunion, and just had to stop to see this pump jack.
Hersel tells the mayor, “This actually is on what was my dad’s land.” She continues, “I can’t believe this is all happening.”
But Hersel has no doubts about the check produced by her mineral rights share on this well.
“It was nice,” she says and laughs.
A couple hours to the south in a Bismarck office, Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, stands in front of a map and points to the region where all the fuss is – the so-called Bakken Formation.
“The Bakken really runs on a line along here north of Interstate 94,” says Ness.
Actually the Bakken sets beneath Canada, Montana, and 24,000 square miles in northwestern North Dakota. It is the largest oil deposit measured by the federal government in the 48 states.
“There are about 350 producing Bakken wells in North Dakota right now, and that number is growing rapidly,” says Ness.
The oil prize is roughly two miles down in a formation of shale, siltstone and shale.
Imagine an oreo cookie, and that’s about what the Bakken Formation looks like. In North Dakota, the oil contained here is very sweet and high quality.
And the times are now right to go get it.
Ness says, “The size of the prize, the price, and the new technology is what’s making this happen.”
Pull up to a drilling rig out here, and at a glance it looks like everyday drilling. But below that rig, the new technology makes the oil-rich Bakken – which is only about 10 to 30 feet thick – viable. Rather than just drilling straight down, crews can now go sideways, say two miles, to tap the oil deposit.
In North Dakota alone, the state estimates there’s 170 billion barrels of oil. For now, 2.1 billion of that is considered recoverable. That amount itself would meet the nation’s needs for a summer.
“We are in boom country,” says Ness.
It’s a countryside that silently speaks of forgotten times with scattered vacant buildings. But now on this wide-open grassland ocean, drilling rigs rise like lighthouses attracting thousands of jobs, and promising thousands more. East of Stanley, Nabors Drilling has a rig at work this early July day. “This rig just came over into North Dakota from Montana,” says Scott Reid, District Manager with Nabors Drilling.
In ten days they’ve gone down 7,000 feet. Once they’re two miles down, the rig will drill sideways for 6,000 feet.
Reid has seven-days-on, seven-days-off employees from well beyond North Dakota.
“We got them coming from Minneapolis, Michigan. We bring them from Rapid City, South Dakota,” says Reid.
One of those crawling around on this rural skyscraper is Minnesotan Dan McNulty. He actually commutes roughly 8 hours weekly between Minneapolis and North Dakota’s oil fields.
“I like to get a big bankroll like everybody likes to do, and then maybe see what my options are,” says McNulty.
Oil offers so many options here that northwestern North Dakota’s no longer a dying memory. It is truly a road to somewhere.
“Anecdotal information just indicates we are making lots of millionaires in North Dakota,” says Ness.
But back at Stanley Mayor Hynek’s well, he doesn’t suddenly see money to burn out here. What he sees is economic fuel.
“It’s raised the pay scale in Stanley, basically anybody who works has been affected one way or another,” says Hynek.
North Dakota has changed. There’s now both room for the wind to blow, and room for a new economy to grow.