Consultancy of the Year – Antea Group

Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative of the Year – Aon Corporation

Drilling & Well Services Company of the Year – Marquis Alliance Energy Group

E&P Company of the Year, sponsored by TEEMCO – QEP Resources, Inc.

Engineering Company of the Year, sponsored by Cosential – Spartan Engineering Inc.

Environmental Initiative of the Year, sponsored by Austin Exploration – TEEMCO, LLC

Future Industry Leader – Megan Starr

Health & Safety Initiative of the Year – FTS International

Industry Leader – Mark C. Peterson

Industry Supplier of the Year – Frank Henry Equipment USA, LLC

Insurance Provider of the Year – IMA, Inc.

Law Firm of the Year – Burleson LLP

Manufacturer of the Year – Cobra Manufacturing & Sales LLC

Midstream Company of the Year, sponsored by Spartan Engineering – High Sierra Energy, LP

Recruitment Agency of the Year – Precision Placement Services, Inc.

Terminal of the Year – Savage

Transaction of the Year, sponsored by mergermarket – Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc.

Trucking Company of the Year – Brady Trucking, Inc.

Water Management Company of the Year – BeneTerra

Congratulations to all of the 2012 Rocky Mountain Oil & Gas Awards winners. Thanks to all of the sponsors and partners.

For full information on the awards please visit: http://www.oilandgasawards.com/?page_id=12

If you would like to arrange interviews, or review video and photo assets and for anything else please contact: Marc Bridgen on +1 (210) 591 8475 or email marc@oilandgasawards.com.

About the Awards:

The Oil & Gas Awards recognize the outstanding achievements made within the Upstream and Midstream sectors of the North American Oil & Gas Industry. The Awards are a platform for the Industry to demonstrate and celebrate the advances made in the key areas of the environment, efficiency, innovation, corporate social responsibility and health & safety. The Awards show the Industry’s motivation to develop by recognizing and rewarding the efforts of corporations and individuals.

The Oil & Gas Industry is of upmost importance to the U.S. National Economy and instrumental to both National and Energy Security. In its areas of operation the Oil & Gas Industry also plays a key role for local communities and their economies. Through innovation the Industry has driven forward technological developments, which have created a renaissance in the energy sector, enabling the U.S. to tap into one of the worlds largest natural gas reserves. In spite of its significance, the Industry still has its critics and gets more than its fair share of negative press. The Oil & Gas Industry has made great gains in meeting its responsibilities to the environment, to corporate social responsibility and the health & safety of staff and the public alike.

The awards take place in the six main onshore Oil and Gas producing regions of North America, including; Gulf Coast, Mid Continent, Northeast, Rocky Mountain, Southwest and West Coast. The Awards are designed to focus on specific regions of North America to allow geographically relevant organizations the ability to network at the gala dinner, and to ensure successful companies can utilize and benefit from their ‘winners status’ within their business community. In combining the Midstream and Upstream sectors, the awards bring together partners, and enable these co-dependent markets to acknowledge one another’s achievements. A number of the Award categories recognize service providers to the Industry, who play a vital role in its success and contribute to its reputation. The Awards welcome entries from organizations of every size and each entry is judged on its individual merits, and on a level playing field with its competition.

The Awards and the Organizations involved will be publicized in local, national and international trade publications and general press, in the run up to and after each ceremony. The core aim of the Oil & Gas Awards is to advertise and promote the Industry’s drive to improve and develop by rewarding organization’s achievements.

The Oil & Gas Awards mission is to become the most prestigious and sought after Awards in the Industry. The reputation of the Awards is paralleled to those of its judges and the Organizations they represent. To this end, appropriate candidates for the judging panels have been carefully researched and recommendations sought to find Industry thought leaders. Each judging panel consists of a mix of highly respected individuals from market leading E&P and Midstream companies.

For additional information, or to arrange interviews with staff, judges or partners please contact Marc Bridgen, Chief Marketing Officer on +1 210 591 8475 or marc@oilandgasawards.com.

Bob van der Valk recently joined the Bakken Oil Business Journal as their Managing Editor of the bi-monthly print and digital journal editions, connecting business and resources for the greater Bakken area. Bob has collaborated & contributed to the editorial voice of the Bakken Oil Business Journal since its inaugural issue in May of 2012. He has been the source of information on the petroleum industry, as a whole, in addition to paying specific attention to the booming growth of Oil & Gas industry in the Bakken Oil Shale Region. Bob is quoted regularly in the national media for his expertise on petroleum industry matters and fluctuations in the prices of petroleum products.

Bob has over 50 years of experience in the downstream refining and marketing sector of the petroleum industry with particular expertise on the U.S. western region. He is also a regular guest on Tom Egelhoff’s “Open for Business” radio program on KMMS-AM 1450 from Bozeman discussing current events in the petroleum industry for the region.

Mary Edwards is the Publisher of the every other month edition of the Journal teeming with petroleum industry articles about the current news, technology advancements, and information pertaining to the businesses and services operating in the Bakken Oil Shale Region. In addition to the glossy color print edtionof the Journal, a corresponding digital version is available via the Internet designed for today’s popular computer tablets & smart phone mobile devices. Up to 4,000 of the Journal’s print editions are mailed direct to a demographic of businesses & companies active in the regional petroleum industry. They are also being made available to individuals attending the top Bakken Oil Regional Conferences & Energy Trade Shows.

By: Amy Dalrymple, Forum News Service
THE DICKENSON PRESS

BISMARCK – Oil companies operating in North Dakota are keeping the brakes on this spring, but a “big surge in production” is expected this summer and fall, the director of the Department of Mineral Resources said Tuesday.

Lynn Helms said he expects the drilling rig count will increase from today’s count of 186 to 198 this summer, bringing as many as 2,000 more workers to Oil Patch communities.

Helms said he expects winter weather and spring road restrictions will continue affecting oil production for a few more months.

“It is going to be May, maybe even June, before production seriously gets underway,” Helms said.

Oil production rose 5.6 percent in February to 778,971 barrels per day, according to preliminary figures Helms released Tuesday.

The figure represents a new all-time high for North Dakota, but Helms said the increase was more modest than what he had projected.

“It’s still difficult to operate an oilfield and drill and frac wells in February, even a good February in North Dakota,” Helms said.

The department expects that winter storms will affect oil production in March and April. Helms projects it will take until May before the state hits 800,000 barrels per day.

“They’re keeping the brakes on as they ramp up a little bit this summer,” Helms said.

But once conditions improve, companies are expected to continue increasing their efficiency and drill more wells in less time.

Helms said the industry is proposing more multi-well pads, with seven wells on one location being the most popular number.

“It’s a positive thing because it decreases the footprint, increases the production and allows us to recover more of the Bakken and Three Forks oil,” Helms said.

One location in North Dakota has 14 wells that have been drilled. Helms said he’s signed three orders approving 18 wells on one location and he knows of two proposals that will come before him requesting to drill 24-well pads.

Flaring of natural gas rose about 1 percent in February to 30.4 percent, the second month in a row with an increase. The high was 36 percent in September 2011.

However, there has been huge improvement in the average number of days a well flares, Helms said. In 2007, a typical well flared for 380 days. In 2011, the average was 172 days and in 2012 the average was 51 days, Helms said.

Helms said he anticipates more progress will be made on reducing flaring this summer.

CenterPoint Energy Bakken Crude Services LLC (CEBCS) said on Tuesday that it has entered into a long-term agreement with XTO Energy Inc., a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corporation, to gather XTO’s crude oil production through a new crude oil gathering and transportation pipeline system in North Dakota’s liquids-rich Bakken shale.

CEBCS is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of CenterPoint Energy Inc. The agreement with XTO is the first agreement entered into pursuant to the open season announced by CEBCS on Feb. 19.

Under the terms of this new agreement, which includes volume commitments, CEBCS will provide service to XTO over a gathering system to be constructed in Dunn and McKenzie counties, N.D. The gathering system will have a capacity of up to 19,500 b/d.

CenterPoint Energy Inc., headquartered in Houston, Texas, is a domestic energy delivery company that includes electric transmission and distribution, natural gas distribution, competitive natural gas sales and services, interstate pipelines and field services operations.

The company serves more than five million metered customers primarily in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas. Assets total more than $22 billion. With over 8,700 employees, CenterPoint Energy and its predecessor companies have been in business for more than 135 years.

–Edgar Ang, eang@opisnet.com

Click here & be heard by US Secretary John Kerry. … do it right now, it only takes 30-seconds.

Please approve the Keystone XL pipeline as quickly as possible. Every day we continue to delay this important piece of U.S. energy infrastructure inhibits our economic growth and weakens American security.

As a military veteran and a well-known supporter of military personnel, veterans and their families, you understand the importance of protecting our national security. Approving the Keystone XL pipeline would directly enhance America’s security, diminishing our dependence on unfriendly foreign oil states and strengthening our relationship with our next-door neighbor and longtime ally, Canada.

The full Keystone XL pipeline would bring in an additional 830,000 barrels of North American oil per day, reducing our need to import oil from places like the Middle East. With Keystone XL, our crude imports from Canada could reach 4 million barrels per day by 2020, twice the amount we now import from the Persian Gulf.

Canada will develop and market their oil reserves regardless of what we do about Keystone XL. It just makes sense to approve this pipeline and bring that fuel to the U.S., to grow our economy, provide jobs for our workers and power our businesses and homes. Americans have waited nearly five years for this pipeline to be approved and for America’s government to increase our energy security. After all the delays, it is time to act.

For almost three decades you exhibited strong leadership in the U.S. Senate. Bring that same leadership to the Department of State and approve the Keystone XL pipeline without delay.

The theme of the 2013 conference is New Energy Horizons.

When the very first Williston Basin Petroleum Conference was envisioned back in 1993, it was planned as a meeting where researchers and industry leaders could sit down and discuss the latest technologies and science to help improve oil production in North Dakota and Saskatchewan.  That first conference in Minot, North Dakota – spearheaded by Dr. Malcolm Wilson who at the time worked for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Industry and Mines, as well as colleagues across the border at the University of North Dakota – sent out 70 invitations.  Over 160 people showed up.

From the get-go, Wilson and the original planners knew they’d come across something big.

“What can you say when you get almost triple the number of people you initially invited to the first conference asking to attend?” notes Wilson, now the CEO of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan. “As the conferences progressed – and began to be managed by the North Dakota Petroleum Council, the Saskatchewan Geological Survey and the PTRC – they expanded to include more and more companies.  It developed a significant tradeshow component, but it’s been very important to keep the technical and scientific sessions expanding as well.”

The conference now alternates, in even and odd numbered years, between North Dakota and Saskatchewan respectively.  In 2012 over 4000 people registered and attended the Bismarck incarnation (no mean feat, for hotel owners and restaurants in a city of under 60,000) and the 2013 event in Regina is expected to attract around 2500 attendees.

The exponential increase in numbers at the conference speaks to the rise of Bakken exploration and development – a formation that contains often difficult-to-access but high quality oil.  The Bakken has become the backbone of the explosive growth in oil production in North Dakota and southern Saskatchewan, and holds enormous potential for additional growth in southwestern Manitoba and Eastern Montana.

What’s in the works for the 2013 conference, which runs April 30 to May 2^nd at Regina’s Evraz Place?

“We’re excited by the technical presenters, and special guest speakers we have lined up for this year’s conference,” noted Melinda Yurkowski, assistant Chief Geologist at the Saskatchewan Geological Survey, the Government of Saskatchewan group that has been setting the technical program. “Aside from presentations on important emerging technologies, and  the latest in enhanced oil recovery happening in the Williston Basin, our first day of the technical sessions will also report on the latest news from industry and government players.”

To attend the presentations requires registering and paying a fee of 300.00 (this rate goes up on the day of the conference to 500.00, so register early!) but there are also a number of public presentations that don’t require conference registration and are open to everyone.  One of those, on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) hopes to provide all the basic information on the technologies employed in this process and discuss in a frank way what it’s all about.  The conference also has two special workshops planned for the conference delegates for a small extra fee – one on core sampling and a second on rock mechanics.  Check out the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference website below for more information.

The some 300 tradeshow booths have been sold out since January, and the tradeshow itself will highlight the best in oilfield technologies.  Special events, a host of receptions, and conference lunches with special-guest speakers will also be provided.

The conference runs April 30 to May 2^nd at Evraz Place.  Visit www.wbpc.ca for full information.

Travis Dewitz - Oil and Gas Industry Photographer - www.travisdewitz.com/crude-oil

Senate Tax heard Senate Bill 295, a bill to repeal the oil and gas “tax holiday” sponsored by Senator Christine Kaufmann (D-Helena) this morning.

Several turned out to testify in opposition of the measure which would kill the oil and gas production incentive passed by the legislature over a decade ago. The incentive, which lasts only the first 12-18 of production, was created to spur economic growth in Montana.

Proponents of SB 295 included the Montana Conservation Voters, Montana Environmental Information Center, and the Northern Plains Resource Council. The chief argument for the bill was that incentives are no longer necessary, and that production taxes are needed to cover the cost of production impacts. Opponents of the bill, however, believe that repealing the incentive would directly impact production and Montana’s economy.

“Exploration in the Bakken is occurring only because of the tax holiday,” said John Alke, opposing the bill on behalf of Fidelity Exploration and Production Company. Alke explained that wells across the border will produce three to four times the volume of those in Montana. “If you eliminate the tax holiday you will not affect the tax burden, but determine where companies will drill for oil.”

Testifying against the bill was Dave Galt for the Montana Petroleum Association who presented information showing a decline in recent production. Montana’s rig count is down to 12, representing a 31.6% drop since last year. Meanwhile, North Dakota’s rig count is more than 175 as of this week.

Also opposing SB 295 was the Montana Contractors Association, Northern Montana Oil & Gas Association, Montana Taxpayers Association, Montana Association of Oil, Gas & Coal Counties, the Montana Chamber of Commerce, and several oil and gas employers.

“Tax breaks exist to create jobs,” explained Nancy Schlepp of the Montana Taxpayers Association. Oil and gas projects have created nearly 30,000 jobs statewide, from Sidney to Kalispell, from oilfield employment, to construction, to retail and hospitality.

“These companies are generating a lot of tax dollars in a log of other ways,” said Webb Brown, President of the Montana Chamber of Commerce. Oil and gas companies paid more than 200 million last year in taxes to fund government programs and local schools, while property taxes paid by the Billings refineries represented one fourth of all property taxes paid in the city. Since 1999, when the production incentive was created, the state has collected over a billion dollars from oil and gas companies.

Bob Gilbert of the Montana Assoc. of Oil, Gas and Coal Counties presented impassioned testimony.  “Let us in Eastern Montana survive,” exclaimed Gilbert. “A skeptic would say this bill is designed to slow down or stop production of oil and gas in Montana; and I’m a skeptic.”

Retreived 3-5-2013. The Montana Petroleum Association, Inc.  A voluntary, non-profit trade association, serving a membership of oil and natural gas producers, gathering and pipeline companies, petroleum refiners, service providers and consultants.

Bob McTeer, Contributor
A former Dallas Fed president, I cover the economy.

The direct way fracking can reduce the budget is by stimulating economic activity and thus tax revenues. This is obvious.

This piece is about another, less obvious, less intuitive, indirect way fracking can reduce the budget deficit. It is based on the fact that the sum of the budget deficit, the capital inflow to finance the trade deficit, and the difference between domestic saving and domestic investment equals zero. If you expand or shrink any of these three imbalances, it puts pressure on the others to expand or shrink to maintain the net zero balance.

As fracking expands domestic oil and gas production, it likely will reduce U.S. demand for energy imports and shrink our trade deficit. This reduces the net capital inflow required to finance the trade deficit. The reduced capital inflow will tend to reduce the gaps between domestic investment and saving and government expenditures and tax revenue—the deficit in question.

Let me back up and elaborate. Income minus consumption gives us saving, by definition. Income minus consumption also gives us investment, since investment represents output not consumed. Therefore, taking consumption out of the equation, total saving must equal total investment.

National saving is composed of personal saving, business saving, and government saving, i.e. an excess of tax revenue over expenditures. Personal saving, as we know, is low but positive these days. Business saving is moderately positive. However, net negative government saving (the budget deficit) overwhelms the others and make total national saving negative. Since we invest more than we save domestically, the saving deficit must be made up by importing foreign saving in the form of the capital inflow that finances the trade deficit. (See the postscript for a further explanation of this.

Therefore, I repeat, these three variables—the investment saving imbalance, the government spending-taxing imbalance and the inverse of the export-import imbalance are linked together (they total zero) and are mutually determined. Other things equal, the reduction in the trade deficit due to fracking will reduce imported capital and put pressure on investment relative to saving and government spending relative to taxing. At least some of the correction is likely to lead to a smaller budget deficit.

Got it?

P.S. In a closed economy with no government, income will adjust to make saving and investment equal in equilibrium. Introducing, government spending and taxing, the two injections into the income stream (other than consumption) will be investment and government spending while the two leakages will be saving and taxing. Therefore, the sum of the injections will equal the sum of the leakages in equilibrium, although there is no requirement for a separate balance of taxing and spending and saving and investment. Introducing foreign trade, exports become a third injection while imports become a third leakage. In equilibrium, investment plus government spending plus exports will equal saving plus taxes plus imports. In our recent past, the excess of government spending over taxes requires a net capital inflow (to finance the excess of imports over exports) to finance the excess of domestic investment over saving. If fracking reduces the excess of imports over exports the other two imbalances must adjust, thus putting downward pressure on the budget deficit.

Retrieved 3-4-2013. Forbes.

What Opportunity Looks Like: Big Mountain meets the Bakken

“The Bakken has definitely been a huge help and a huge source of revenue to us.”

For many Montanans the Bakken boom has provided a plethora of opportunities. For the Gearhart family of Whitefish, the growth in the oil patch has meant growth in their family-owned business, Big Mountain Glass (BMG).

The company, owned by Chris and Kathy Gearheart, has been in Montana for 41 years and has provided commercial glazing on projects such as the Metra in Billings, the new UM Native American Studies Center in Missoula, the Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital in Hamilton, and the Whitefish Emergency Service Center, to name a few. BMG has twelve full time employees, including son and MSU graduate Scott Gearhart. Scott’s the Commercial Project Manager for the company. Scott’s wife is a full time nurse, and works part time at Big Mountain Glass as well. They also have a seven year old daughter.

With a degree in Construction and Engineering Technology from Bozeman, Scott explained that working for the family business was always part of the plan, saying that it only took a few years of working outside of Montana to realize it was where he wanted to return to work and raise his family.

Before the downturn in the local economy, says Scott, Big Mountain had twenty one full time employees. With the recent resurgence of job opportunities in North Dakota and Eastern Montana, however, he said, “The Bakken has definitely been a huge help and a huge source of revenue to us.”

The first Bakken project for Big Mountain Glass started three years ago. The Gearharts’ business has done everything from small glass instillation projects for schools, strip malls, and NAPA stores in Watford City and around Williston, to a couple of large scale projects in Dickinson and Bismarck.

“We were actually sought out to bid the penitentiary expansion job in Bismarck,” said Scott. Big Mountain not only bid the job, they won it. “This is a major project of over a million dollars in glass,” said Scott. Some of the other large scale projects they’ve worked on include housing complexes for Halliburton. Big Mountain is also waiting to hear back on a medical clinic job they bid recently in Dickinson.

Scott explains that compared to Montana, there is such a shortage of contractors bidding jobs in North Dakota that there’s almost no competition. New contractors are moving into North Dakota with no subcontractor base. The growth is outpacing the workforce, creating job opportunities for contractors, truckers, builders, skilled laborers, small businesses, and many others far beyond North Dakota.

Estimating revenue from the Bakken alone, Scott says oil patch projects account for 15% of his family’s business. Luckily for Scott, he only has to leave the Flathead about once every four months to check on jobs in North Dakota to make sure things are running smoothly. For Scott’s younger brother Tyler, however, the story is quite different.

Tyler Gearhart, like his brother, graduated from MSU in Bozeman where he lives today. He received his degree in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and now works as a MWD Field Technician for The Directional Drilling Company. He was recommended for the position by his uncle, who Tyler says has worked in the oil fields for the better part of two decades. Tyler’s main responsibilities include assembling tools for down hole monitoring, setting up surface gear, and taking surveys. Like most true blue Montanans, the Gearhart brothers spend their free time outdoors fishing and skiing (pictured above).
“It was always a goal of mine to stay in Montana after college,” said Tyler, who describes the worse part of his job as the long periods away from home. He says the best thing about his job is the people.

“Don’t make assumptions about what goes on in the oilfields,” said Tyler, “Come out and experience things before you jump to conclusions.”

By CHIP BROWN Published: January 31, 2013

Long before the full frenzy of the boom, you could see its harbingers at the Mountrail County courthouse in Stanley, N.D. Geologists had pored over core samples and log signatures and had made their educated guesses, and now it was the hour of the “landmen,” the men and women whose job was to dig through courthouse books for the often-tangled history of mineral title and surface rights.

Apart from a few fanatics who sometimes turned up at midnight, the landmen would begin arriving at the courthouse around 6 a.m. In the dead of winter, it would still be dark and often 20 or 30 below zero, and because the courthouse didn’t open until 7:30, the landmen would leave their briefcases outside the entrance, on the steps, in the order they arrived. And then they would go back to their cars and trucks to wait with the engines running, their faces wreathed in coffee steam. Sometimes there were more than 20 briefcases filed on the courthouse steps. The former landman who told me this — Brent Brannan, now director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Research Program — said he sometimes thought he could see the whole boom in that one image, briefcases waiting for the day to start, and it killed him a little that he never took a picture.

For many years North Dakota has been a frontier — not the classic 19th-century kind based on American avarice and the lure of opportunity in unsettled lands, but the kind that comes afterward, when a place has been stripped bare or just forgotten because it was a hard garden that no one wanted too much to begin with, and now it has reverted to the wilderness that widens around dying towns. In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood you can’t shake as you drive all day in a raw spring rain with nothing but fence posts and featureless cattle range for company thinking, Is this all there is? until finally you get out at some windswept intersection and gratefully fall on the fellowship of a dog-faced bar with a jukebox of songs about people on their way to somewhere else.

All of which may explain the shock of coming around a bend and suddenly finding a derrick illuminated at night, or a gas flare framed by stars, or dozens of neatly ranked trailers in a “man camp,” or a vast yard of drill pipe, or a herd of water trucks, or tracts of almost-finished single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field. North Dakota has had oil booms before but never one so big, never one that rivaled the land rush precipitated more than a century ago by the transcontinental railroads, never one that so radically changed the subtext of the Dakota frontier from the Bitter Past That Was to the Better Future That May Yet Be.

It’s hard to think of what oil hasn’t done to life in the small communities of western North Dakota, good and bad. It has minted millionaires, paid off mortgages, created businesses; it has raised rents, stressed roads, vexed planners and overwhelmed schools; it has polluted streams, spoiled fields and boosted crime. It has confounded kids running lemonade stands: 50 cents a cup but your customer has only hundreds in his payday wallet. Oil has financed multimillion-dollar recreation centers and new hospital wings. It has fitted highways with passing lanes and rumble strips. It has forced McDonald’s to offer bonuses and brought job seekers from all over the country — truck drivers, frack hands, pipe fitters, teachers, manicurists, strippers. It has ginned up an unreleased reality show called “Boomtown Girls,” which follows the lives of “five bold and brave sisters” in the formerly drowsy farm center of Williston, N.D. Williston, whose population has tripled in the past 10 years, lies in the middle of the 150,000-square-mile Williston Basin, a depression in the crust of the earth that geologists now believe contains one of the largest oil fields in the world.

In the fall of 2011 in Crosby, N.D., Continental Resources, the oil company with the most acreage leased in the basin, erected a self-congratulatory granite monument celebrating its work in the so-called Bakken Formation, the Williston Basin rocks that, as Continental put it, ushered in “a new era in the American oil industry.” The number of rigs drilling new wells in North Dakota’s part of the basin reached a record 218 last May. It has now leveled off at around 200, as thousands of wells have been completed under deadline pressure to secure expiring mineral leases. Many thousands more will be spudded in the next two years as the boom moves from discovery to production and crews drill “infill” wells, complete pipelines, fortify roads, enlarge refineries and build natural-gas pumping stations and oil-loading train yards.

North Dakota’s last oil boom, 30 years ago, collapsed so quickly when prices crashed that workers in the small city of Dickinson left the coffee in their cups when they quit their trailers. Apostles of “Bakken gold” insist that what’s different this time is that this time is different, the history of frontier avarice notwithstanding. This is the boom that is going to change everything without the remorse and misgivings that have marked the aftermath of so many past orgies of resource extraction. This is the boom that won’t leave the land trashed, won’t destroy communities, won’t afflict the state with the so-called Dutch Disease in which natural-resource development and the sugar rush of fast cash paradoxically make other parts of the economy less competitive and more difficult to sustain. This is the boom being managed by local people certain they know how to look after their interests and safeguard the land they live on. This is the Big One that North Dakota has been waiting for for more than a century. [… read more.]

Retrieved: 7 February 2013. The NY Times. Original Story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/north-dakota-went-boom.html?_r=1&