On The Plains, The Rush For Oil Has Changed Everything | Hacker News Reader

On The Plains, The Rush For Oil Has Changed Everything

npr.org

63 pointstokenadult40 comments

Heh it's exactly like the rural towns that get turned into mining towns here in Australia. I've worked as a labourer out there with my dad (he's a civil engineer, works on the roads out in these towns). They start as a tiny rural area, developed into a boom-bust town that caters to the fly-in-fly-out workers who come in to work for 6 figures. Then the mine closes, and the town is left as a shadow of its former self, but with so much extra real estate, empty shops, and closed bars (apart from one or two). It's curious to watch.

This area has seen it before in recent times, and though this time will probably last longer, there is a lot of planning on how to grow then shrink.

Contrary, to the article, Williston has never been a "nice" town, and that gif is f'n scary.

In the deserts of California, there are many towns that were booming during the various gold/silver/etc booms and now are, if they still exist, a mere shadow of themselves. The town of Darwin, CA is one that I was talking with someone about recently...Circa 1900, several thousand people, 2010 census - 43.

Seems like there is a design project waiting to be done for dynamic infrastructure.

You mean burning man?

Excellent point, Burning Man does share a lot of the properties of a booming mining town :-)

And then everyone complains about lost jobs ..

That animated GIF near the bottom of the article is super creepy.

I have to say, I really dig 'em both (there's another in the article headline). A very unique effect.

They're called cinemagraphs, here's a link: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cinemagraph/

Agreed. A picture of a human motionless except for one body part === uncanny valley.

I know! Is this some new NPR web thing? I think I prefer the Times' full-screen hard-to-control multimedia extravaganzas. At least they look good. :b

Off topic: How do these animated gifs cope with the 256 colour limit?

By using dithering. You can see it quite clearly on the guy's face if you zoom in.

I kept looking at the older gents behind him to move/speak/scratch but I just kept seeing that guys hand move :-/

The salaries in the oil sands in Canada are even more ridiculous. > 100k for truck drivers. Entry level engineers at 150k + 30% bonuses. > 200 + 40% on site bonuses for a manager.

I don't suppose you mean software engineers? :-)

Nope, software dev salaries around Calgary are stuck at $65-70k starting.

(Grew up in ND, live in SD now)

At one time starting wages were $100k/year, but I don't know anyone starting that high nowadays, except maybe strippers.

The "man camps" are pretty horrible and most people blow their pay on booze and girls before they leave. It's really depressing.

Welders still get that, truck drivers with some OT.

The local towns will probably have the housing in the next year so the camps will be gone. Sewage planning is an amazingly complicated process. Also, the road changes to loop around towns are going to help.

Yeah, this is very common. It's simple economics: the barrier to entry for the majority of "starting at 100K" jobs was just geography, due to a short supply of workers and a huge demand. Eventually enough workers flood in, the wages drop, and the only people who can get a high starting salary are the highly skilled tradesmen (drill operators, welders, etc)

Tie onto that the fact that rents are relatively high due to a housing shortage, and you get a bunch of people living paycheck to paycheck just like they were before.

Skilled vocational workers still make the cash (and drivers for other reasons), but grunts make grunt wages. There are several state grants to get more vocational training, not only for oil but for the extremely short supply of people for infrastructure projects. Due to worker and driver shortages many building projects in the east are delayed or taking much longer than thought.

Yep. We can thank our idiot high school guidance counselors in the US for this. If you are a high school student who is remotely responsible and productive, you are pushed to go to college for a "good job" and are actively dissuaded from any alternative except the military.

Slacker? Stoner? Bad grades? Well ok then, maybe the trades are for you. This is why when I worked construction, on most crews I worked on, I was surrounded by fucking losers. When I got into the specialized stuff, I got to work with real tradesmen.

Sounds a lot like the Paradox of Plenty [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse]. ND is fixated on the oil industry to the detriment of absolutely everything else.

Hell, aren't they just burning all the extracted natural gas because it's basically a distraction from the liquid crude? There was an terribly sad update of the "Earth at Night" satellite image showing ND lit up like a Christmas Tree.

They're trying to capture the gas now, ND issued some new rules on it.

ND is not just fixated on oil, farming is just as big as ever. Look at the number of crops ND is first or second in the nation at delivering. Lord knows the words this spring will be "flood control" in the east.

They need to send some people to Norway to learn how it's done: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144... (Google the URL and click on the link to bypass the paywall, or read it here: http://pastebin.com/055t6hiM).

My understanding was they were extracting natural gas and burning off methane. Methane is much more difficult to transport (because the molecules are so small it leaks out of everything as a gas and its very difficult to get it cold enough to be a liquid). Eventually they'll have methane transport capabilities but for the moment it just gets burned off.

Natural gas is perhaps 80% +- 15% methane. The rest is a variety of gasses, some of which constitute useful fuels in themselves, like propane and butane: these may be incorporated into the finished product (which is why we don't sell it as "methane"), or fractionated out.

Historically, one saw 'stranded natural gas' flared from oil wells that produced too little natural gas or were in too remote a place to make a pipeline economical. Compressed natural gas is so low-energy-density that it's rarely economical to transport it outside the context of a pipeline - though this has changed in the last few decades with the adoption of liquified natural gas tanker ships and terminals to serve them; Still, the percentage of the value consumed by transportation is an order of magnitude higher than for oil tankers.

> There was an terribly sad update of the "Earth at Night" satellite image showing ND lit up like a Christmas Tree

Why is it sad? The light is from lights in towns, etc, not gas fires.

Parent is presumably rooting for North Korea over South Korea based on the famous nighttime photos. ;)

GP might be referring to this NASA satellite image, which the article says are burning gas flares of fracking rigs:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10463494/Fr...

From my limited understanding it's not profitable enough to capture and transport the burn off.

Transport of the gas would itself require either some sort of pipelines, or gas liquefaction and transport via rail. Neither are particularly cheap, and natural gas prices are, for the moment, near all-time lows.

(Storage, of course, is wildly implausible. Leaving the gas for extraction later at more profitable prices probably wouldn't be worth the time-value-of-money adjusted profits you could make by immediate extraction.)

The NYT had an interesting video-based article [1] looking at the life of a female truck driver who moved to North Dakota due to the oil boom.

tldr: steady work but lower-than-expected wages, poor conditions, male dominated environment, housing problems.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/running-on-fumes-i...

Even NASA has seen the difference in ND from space.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10463494/Fr...

I gather this is the result of the increasing price of crude oil, making small oil fields that weren't previously considered viable now viable. The output of these wells is enough to essentially stop oil prices from going through the roof for the time being.

It's not just that the cost of crude is up, advances in horizontal drilling and fracking have made these wells economical despite lower crude prices.

Fracking has been tried on and off for decades but it was only recently that wildcatters struck upon the right formula and techniques to unlock the Bakken.

Horizontal drilling is key in this region because the Bakken is like an oreo cookie: a thin layer of crude sandwiched between two huge layers of rock. Fracking breaks up the small inner layer while horizontal drilling lets a single well drill down into that layer and then within that layer, unlocking far more crude than with regular vertical drilling.

Fracking and horizontal drilling are 20-30 years old technologies. The only reason they're practical now are high oil prices. Technological improvements have been rather incremental in last 20 years in those.

What was needed was not technology, but oil prices over $80 per barrel.

At least that's what someone who does this for living said.

You're ignoring improvements in fracking that have only happened in the last 15 years. Certainly fracking itself isn't new at all, the first attempts date back under a century, but the cost has come down. Most fracking was done using vastly more expensive chemical concoctions which were largely unsuccessful in a lot of shale formations—until someone tried with a solution that was mostly water. Not only was it more effective, it was half the price!

Moreover, fracking came in to vogue due to drilling for natural gas, not crude.

Most of this is natural gas and not crude oil. The reason these fields are now viable is because of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Before fracking, no one thought you'd ever get any oil out of that area. Now all of a sudden its all available again. Its like finding a new gusher just because you can drill deeper than you could before.

Also natural gas is WAY cheaper now that it was 5 years ago. Its so cheap that a lot of oil companies are voluntarily not pumping out of some good wells because they want to decrease supply.

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