the April 25, 2011

new yorker

ANNALS OF INNOVATION

KUWAIT ON THE PRAIRIE

Can North Dakota solve the energy problem?

BY eric konigsberg
 ANNALS OF INNOVATION
N orth Dakota is booming. Its unemploy-
ment rate is the lowest in the country,
3.7 per cent, and so many people have moved
there for jobs that last year local officials de-
KUWAIT ON THE PRAIRIE clared a housing crisis. The new workers have
been drawn by the Williston Basin, in the
western part of the state, which holds the
Can North Dakota solve the energy problem? largest accumulation of oil identified in
North America since 1968, when the Prud-
BY eric konigsberg hoe Bay field was found, on the North Slope
of Alaska. Oil companies have booked mo-
tels within two hours’ drive for a year in ad-
vance; last summer, relocated workers con-
verted the lawn of a town park into a tent city.
About a hundred new wells are blasted
into the ground every month. Seen from a
distance on U.S. Highway 2, the derricks
form a straight crease—giants reduced to
props by a landscape that the novelist Larry
Woiwode described as a vast plane, “its
flatness tugging the sky tight at every horizon,
as if it were tied there.” One day a few months
ago, beside a trailer parked near the center
of the basin, half a dozen men prepared to
send enough explosives underground to
dismantle an armored tank. The fire­power
consisted of twenty-four “shaped charges”—
little cone-shaped shells housed in foot-long
metal cannisters called perforating guns.
When the charges were detonated by an elec-
trical signal, each shell would explode into the
surrounding rock, forming corridors through
which oil could flow into the well.
The workers, who were mostly in their
twenties or thirties, wore hard hats, steel-toed
boots, and coveralls stained to the chest with
crude oil. One of them screwed four perfo-
rating guns together, attached them to a
heavy wire, then lowered them into a hole
bored in the ground. As the wire unspooled
from an enormous drum mounted on the
back of the trailer, another man, inside, used
a joystick to control the guns’ descent. It took
almost an hour before the guns neared the far
end of the L-shaped wellbore, an under-
ground trip of nearly four miles, and began to
withdraw. A third worker knelt on the floor
of the trailer like a preacher and studied a col-
umn of numbers written on a window, down-
hole distances where the men were to set off
the explosions: 19,971 feet, then 19,909, then
19,850. On closed-circuit radio, a voice from
a trailer across the lot addressed the worker
on the joystick: “Steady, keep it steady.”
“He’s got to have a doctor’s touch on that
drum wire,” the engineer in charge of the
well, Russell Rankin, said. Rankin, who was
clean-shaven and had on a class ring and a
carefully ironed golf shirt, works for Brigham
A crew in the Williston Basin, which contains billions of barrels of oil—enough to supply the country for years, if it can be safely extracted. The boom, one resident said, has brought “free money.” Photographs by Thomas Struth. Exploration, based in Austin, Texas, one of
some hundred and fifty oil companies that
have entered the basin since 2006. “Every-
body sent up here is on the same mission,
which is: Solve the puzzle of this place,”
Rankin said. “We know there’s oil there. But
how much of it can you get out of the rock?”
The rock is the Bakken formation, a layer
of the basin that geologists believe holds a
twenty-five-thousand-square-mile sea of oil.
(The formation is mostly beneath the surface
of North Dakota, but it extends into Mon-
tana and Canada.) The head of the state’s de-
partment of mineral resources, Lynn Helms,
recently estimated that the region could con-
tain eleven billion barrels of oil that can be
obtained using current technology, nearly
enough to supply the United States for two
years. That assessment has doubled since a
2008 United States Geological Survey study,
and the amount that will eventually be recov-
erable is the subject of intense speculation.
“The Williston Basin is still relatively under-
explored and poorly understood in terms of
its geology,” Helms said. “It’s a subterranean
detective story.”
A hundred and thirteen million barrels of
crude oil were produced in North Dakota last
year—more than five per cent of the coun-
try’s domestic output. (The U.S. produces
slightly less than half of the oil it consumes.)
The increase is well timed. Last month, with
oil prices rising, President Obama announced
the goal of reducing by one-third America’s
reliance on foreign oil by 2025. But the re-
strictions on offshore drilling that followed
the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill have limited
domestic oil production, and the disastrous
blowup at Japan’s Fukushima plant last
month has made an increase in nuclear power
politically untenable. Meanwhile, the past
two years were the first since 1991 in which
domestic oil production increased, owing
substantially to North Dakota’s contribu-
tions. Geologists believe that Williston could
be at the beginning of a twenty-year boom.
When the perforation guns were lined up
at the proper depth, the man on his knees
placed his hands on a wall panel that held
knobs, dials, switches, and a key in a keyhole.
“Plug it?” he asked. Rankin nodded, and he
gently turned the key. A few seconds later, the
needles of a meter bounced abruptly. A
worker who stood hugging a vertical pipe
near the wellhead gave a thumbs-up, to indi-
cate that he had felt a rumble from the far-
away explosion. In the trailer, all was quiet.
O il companies often name their wells
after the family that owns the surround-
ing land, and, because this part of the state
was settled overwhelmingly by Norwegian
immigrants and their descendants, the well
names have a certain uniformity of character:
the Erickson, the Sorenson, the Mortenson,
the Tjelde, the Bakke, the Brakken. Rankin’s
new well was registered with the North Da-
kota Industrial Commission as the Abe, after
Abe Owan, a local businessman, on whose
property Brigham had already installed the
Owan, the Abe Owan, and the Owan-Neh-
ring. “Abe’s got a lot of land, and we’re start-
ing to run out of names,” Rankin said.
Rankin is the principal engineer and over-
seer of Brigham’s wells in the Bakken. In
2010, he was made responsible for much of
the company’s four-hundred-million-dollar
budget and was put in charge of hiring all the
rig contractors and work crews involved. By
August, he and his wife and sons had moved
from Austin to Williston. For the time being,
they live in a trailer in the company’s equip-
ment yard. Rankin considers his wells “not ex-
actly like my kids, but let’s say close enough.”
In a span of just four days a few months ago,
he met with dozens of service providers—
pipeline construction, solids disposal, right-
of-way acquisition, electrical supply, pumping
units—along with the mayor of Williston, the
director of economic development, and
officers of the state land department. One
morning, he told everybody he hadn’t yet seen
to meet him at the big table at Trapper’s Ket-
tle for breakfast, and they took turns sitting
next to him.
Rankin is thirty-eight, six feet tall, and
broad in the beam. He has a high forehead
and wears large eyeglasses, which together
give the appearance that he is always about to
ask politely if you’ve got a minute. He grew up
in Marietta, Oklahoma, where his father
worked as an insurance agent and his mother
taught business math to middle-school stu-
dents. He liked fossils: “I was always picking
things up on camping trips—small crusta-
ceans, because Oklahoma was once a shallow
sea, during the Cretaceous period.” He
wanted to become a military pilot, and ap-
plied to the Air Force Academy, but his vision
wasn’t good enough. “The people who don’t
see well, they usually make them into com-
puter programmers, so I got an engineering
scholarship to the University of Oklahoma,”
he said. “Pretty quickly, if you’re studying en-
gineering in Oklahoma, the oil companies
come for you.”
An out-of-town oilman in North Dakota
can be met with a degree of suspicion, and
Rankin says that the people he meets often
“expect J. R. Ewing in a designer suit and
cowboy boots, with a big-shot belt buckle.”
But he retains the deferential manner of a
mid-level petroleum engineer. Sometimes,
on the way to an appointment, he’ll check his
reflection in the car mirror and declare,
“That’s good enough for the girls I go with.”
At Brigham’s headquarters, in Austin,
Rankin’s superiors regard his earnestness
with amusement, smiling at one another
when he enters a brief meeting armed with
giant maps, delineated by seismography, to-
pography, and land-ownership. He is so com-
pulsive about the execution of his wells that,
before the ground is broken, he has all the
thirty-foot joints of steel pipe that will make
up the wellbore stacked neatly in the order
that he plans to install them—from one to
seven hundred, give or take. Brigham is gam-
bling a great deal on the success of these
wells. It has acquired the rights to nearly four
hundred thousand acres in the Williston
“play,” as oil prospects are called, and has a
roster of more than a thousand new wells to
drill between now and 2021. “Since the end
of 2008, we’ve moved about ninety-five per
cent of our money out of projects in Texas
and the Gulf Coast and into the Williston
Basin,” Ben (Bud) Brigham, the company’s
founder, said. “We’ve kind of taken the all-or-
nothing position.”
A round noon on April 4, 1951, An-
 drew (Blackie) Davidson, the drilling
superintendent on a wildcat well east of Wil-
liston, set fire to a rag and flung it in the air.
He watched as its trajectory met an invisible
stream of natural gas that emanated from the
ground, sending a flare thirty feet into the
sky; by nightfall, it could be seen ten miles
away. There was oil in North Dakota.
This was the state’s first producing well,
the Clarence Iverson No. 1. Davidson had
been sent up from Oklahoma by Amerada
Petroleum, and he and his crew became local
heroes. “I never thought I’d be so important
in my whole life,” Leon (Tude) Gordon, who
bottled the state’s first pint of oil, recalled.
“Blackie and I could’ve run for mayor if we’d
wanted.” Time devoted a cover story to Am-
erada’s find, and by the end of the year pros-
pectors had secured leases on almost two-
thirds of the land in North Dakota. The
Clarence Iverson No. 1 recovered nearly six
hundred thousand barrels in the next three
decades, and enabled Clarence Iverson him-
self, the wheat farmer who owned the land
and the drilling rights beneath the well, to
“pretty much retire” at the age of forty-four,
his son Cliff told me. Of his parents’ activities
since then, Cliff said, “They went to visit their
relatives in Minnesota is about all they done.”
More discoveries followed, and several
formations within the Williston Basin were
identified as oil-bearing zones. But, because
the world was then running a surplus of
crude oil, the state imposed strict quotas on
North Dakota’s wells. “We have oil running
out of our ears,” an Amerada executive said at
the time. Later booms worked out no better.
In 1973, panic over the OPEC embargo set off
another short-term drilling bonanza, and a
large share of the local population took jobs
in the oil field. “The second boom was bigger,
but it ended much worse, because of all the
locals who decided to join up,” Ed Grand-
bois, an equipment salesman in Williston,
told me. “When the companies pulled out, a
lot of people said, ‘I’m leaving, and if I can get
a steady job I’m not coming back.’ ”
In Elwyn Robinson’s definitive “History
of North Dakota,” the author notes a recur-
ring pattern of geographic disappointment:
the land has always fallen short of people’s
expectations. Early settlers mistook the sub-
humid Missouri Plateau, which occupies the
western half of the state, for the same fertile
ground that was being farmed successfully in
the East. The state was built virtually over-
night by overeager railroad lines and by Min-
nesota’s flour-milling corporations. They
brought prosperity, but also higher land
prices than many farmers could afford. All of
it created resentment; the state was a “colo-
nial hinterland” of the Twin Cities, Robinson
wrote, its resources and citizens “patronized
and belittled.” The population, estimated at
sixteen thousand in 1878, grew to almost six
hundred thousand by 1910 and has remained
more or less constant ever since.
In 1953, J. W. Nordquist, a geologist for
Phillips Petroleum, established that there was
oil in a three-hundred-and-sixty-million-
year-old formation which he named for the
Bakken family, whose farm, near Williston,
was the site of his discovery. He took note of
the formation’s unusual, three-tiered compo-
sition, which he characterized as “an Oreo
cookie”: sandwiched between two layers of
black shale was a thin and elusive layer of do-
lomite, where the oil lay. But for decades the
Bakken was ignored. The shale was consid-
ered too “tight,” or lacking the adequate po-
rosity, to justify the expense of drilling.
A commercial breakthrough came in
2000, after Richard Findley, an oil explora-
tionist who had analyzed old well logs, be-
came convinced that large sections of the
Bakken on the Montana side of the basin
contained considerable amounts of accessible
oil. He persuaded a small outfit called Lyco to
drill. “Dick called it ‘Sleeping Giant’ when he
brought it to us,” Michael Lewis, the project’s
supervising geologist, told me. Although the
play, which became known as the Elm Cou-
lee field, has since produced about a hundred
million barrels of oil, most people in the in-
dustry considered it a one-off, Lewis said.
“Nobody thought the rest of the Bakken was
anything like it.”
The most influential dissenting opinion
came from Leigh Price, a geochemist at the
U.S.G.S. field office in Denver, who pro-
duced a radically optimistic assessment of the
Bakken’s total reserves. Price had studied the
formation for decades and had come to re-
gard it as fundamentally different from other
petroleum sources. One theory of modern
geology holds that most of the world’s hydro-
carbon reserves were generated in six vast
“source rock” formations—typically, layers of
the ocean floor where, during six distinct
geologic periods, organic matter was sub-
sumed rapidly into the earth, and eventually
matured into oil or gas. Historically, prospec-
tors were able to recover oil only after it mi-
grated away from source rock; although
much of the oil simply dispersed, a relatively
small amount trickled upward into reservoirs,
nearer the surface, where it can be more easily
recovered.
In 1994, the Williston region’s oil indus-
try was focussed on such a reservoir: the
Madison, a limy formation that sits on top of
the Bakken. Most geologists believed that the
oil had seeped up from the Bakken, directly
underneath. But, as Price and Julie LeFever, a
geologist for the state, began comparing rock
samples from various locations in the Willis-
ton Basin, they found themselves unable to
correlate the Bakken and the Madison; the
two are “compositionally distinct,” Price and
LeFever wrote.They could only conclude that
the oil Nordquist found in the Bakken had
never migrated anywhere; all of it remained
enclosed. In 1999, Price submitted for peer
review a paper that calculated an astonishing
mean of four hundred and thirteen billion
barrels of oil in place. The Middle Bakken
layer—the filling of the Oreo—was full of
natural fractures that appeared to hold oil the
way a sponge holds water. In an unsupported
bit of speculation, he estimated that at least
half the reserves could be cost-effectively re-
covered—an amount close to the combined
capacity of Iraq and Kuwait.
The findings were controversial. Price, an
avid weight-lifter who wore his hair
in a ponytail, was regarded by colleagues
as arrogant, and it didn’t help that, in the
article, he boasted of its “staggering con-
clusion.” Wallace Dow, a geochemist
who had done influential research on
source rock in the Bakken, said, “I never
bought his computation methods; they were
too high, but he liked to be the radical.”
Though he and Price were friends, he said,
“people worried that Leigh and I were about
to come to fisticuffs once at a petroleum meet-
ing when we argued about it. I told him,
‘You’re out of your mind.’ ” The U.S.G.S. de-
clined to publish the paper. Price died in 2000,
of a heart attack.
By coincidence, a short time later Robert
Coskey, a geologist in Denver who was devel-
oping software to build models of oil basins,
phoned the local U.S.G.S. office to inquire
about the available data on the Williston
Basin. “I just wanted some demo data to plug
in for a formation—I wasn’t even looking for
oil,” Coskey recalled. “I asked for Price, and
they said, ‘You just missed him.’ ”The U.S.G.S.
allowed Coskey to look through files in Price’s
office, where he discovered the research on the
Bakken. Coskey told me, “When I plugged in
his numbers, it didn’t even look like an oil
field, they were so huge.”
F or Brigham Exploration, the decade be-
fore Coskey’s analysis had often been
frustrating. The company had drilled five
hundred wells, with a discovery rate more
than three times the industry average, but it
struggled with volatile energy prices and an
overly ambitious drilling schedule. “The his-
tory of our company seems like we were al-
ways one big well away from success,” Rankin
said.
Bud Brigham is a slight, gentle man of
fifty-one, with a boyish mop of straw-colored
hair. He grew up in the oil-patch town of
Midland, Texas, where his father was an oil-
and-gas attorney and his mother worked for
Cy Wagner, a high-profile wildcatter. At the
University of Texas, he discovered Ayn Rand
(a sticker on his Audi S.U.V. reads “Who Is
John Galt?”) and geophysics. He went into
business with his wife, Anne, a geologist and
a lawyer, and built a reputation for skillfully
deploying a mapping technique called 3-D
seismic imaging to pinpoint hydrocarbon de-
posits in areas with little margin for error.
In 2005, as Brigham labored at traditional
exploration work—“searching hunt-and-
peck,” as he put it—other operators were hav-
ing success in natural-gas fields. These were
“resource plays”—large formations, easy to
find but stubborn to extract from—that had
recently been made viable by new recovery
technologies. Brigham said, “If you can un-
lock the reservoir, it becomes more like min-
ing or a factory.” He was envious, he told me.
New technologies—including the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing—are unlocking huge reserves of oil that for decades were thought to be inaccessible. Scores of companies are competing to extract it. “It’s a subterranean detective story,” a state official said.
“We were watching our peers get rich off it.”
That year, he instructed his staff to scour
the country for a resource play, and in the
summer a Brigham delegation attended a
trade show in Houston and found a booth ad-
vertising a deal in the Bakken formation. A
company from Denver wanted to unload
forty-six thousand acres. Oil resource plays
like the Bakken are rare, Brigham said—more
lucrative than natural gas but also more chal-
lenging, because oil molecules move less
easily through rock fractures. “We ended up
getting it for about a hundred dollars an acre,”
Jeff Larson, Brigham’s head of exploration,
said. “The Bakken was a little too wild for
them.”
It was a gamble. Around that time, the di-
rector of a research center at the University of
North Dakota got hold of Leigh Price’s paper
and posted it on the Internet, where it began
to attract interest. But nobody had success-
fully drilled that part of the Bakken. Elm
Coulee, the Montana discovery, was forty
miles away, and its oil was contained in a neat
rock trap at the edge of the basin. “Our acre-
age was in the center of the basin, no traps,”
Pat Medlock, a Brigham geologist, said. “But
that gave us a nice thickness of Middle Bak-
ken”—the promising center of the Oreo.
The next year, Brigham drilled three wells
in North Dakota, and the results were dis-
couraging. “They were poor wells,” Rankin
said. By Brigham’s estimate, a Bakken well
needs an initial production rate of four
hundred barrels a day in order to be viable.
These came in at around two hundred, and,
Rankin says, “we cooled down in a hurry.”
Many in Williston thought the company’s
acreage was barren. Rankin recalled, “People
kept asking us, ‘What the hell are you doing
there? It’s a graveyard.’ ”
A t the time, the industry was combin-
ing two innovative techniques to extract
oil from difficult sources like the Bakken.
One, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in-
volves pumping water and chemicals into a
well under such pressure that cracks form in
the surrounding rock and release hydrocar-
bons. About three million gallons of water
and chemicals are injected into the bore over
the weeklong course of a fracturing treat-
ment, along with four million pounds of
“proppant”—sand and tiny ceramic beads
that get inside the fractures and prop them
open to allow oil or gas to flow.
The other technique, horizontal drilling,
prepares a well for fracking by extending the
wellbore laterally through the pay zone—the
oil-rich part of a rock bed.The Middle Bakken
layer is thin—between ten and fifty feet thick
through most of the basin—which makes it all
but impossible for a vertical well to gain pur-
chase. At a restaurant one night, Rankin dem-
onstrated the principle for me, using a drink-
ing straw from a glass of iced tea. “This here’s
the wellbore, and this is vertical,” he said,
sinking the straw down through the face of a
quarter loaf of garlic bread, which represented
oil-bearing rock.The straw was in contact with
bread through only a small area, from the top
of the piece to the bottom. “Now, if I’m a
horizontal well and I’m making a long lateral,
look at this.” He poked the straw sideways into
the bread and out the tapering heel, permitting
the well to tunnel the long way through the pay
zone. “You get two miles of pay.”
Horizontal drilling has become extraor-
dinarily precise. “If your house was ten thou-
sand feet underground, these guys could
bring a drill bit through the front door and
out the back,” an oil-industry blogger wrote
last year. Increasingly sophisticated sensors
provide hundreds of calculations per minute
as a drill bores ahead, dictating the angle at
which to adjust the bit in order to maintain
a graceful curve that won’t kink the pipe.
Still, a lot of guessing is involved with a new
play. “It’s science, but it’s also an art form,”
Rankin said one day at the Boots, another
well that he was putting in. We were watch-
ing members of the mud-logging crew, who
followed the drill’s progress by analyzing the
rocks it spit out. With every wormlike ad-
vance of thirty feet the wellbore made, one
of the crew members was sent to collect
fresh cuttings, which were expelled from a
pipe and collected in a metal tank called a
possum belly.
“The cuttings tell us where the bit is—
whatever just reached the surface, they’re the
last thing the drill ate,” the mud-logging su-
pervisor, Kathy Neset, told me in her lab, a
trailer stationed beside the rig. “Oil-bearing
rock will glow if we put it under ultraviolet
light. A good well, the sample bag will be
dripping oil.” She handed me a gray nugget of
Middle Bakken rock that had been kicked to
the surface. It was dense, heavy, and generally
unremarkable; it didn’t look as if it could pos-
sibly be porous enough to contain oil. “You see
what they mean by tight rock?” Neset said.
Neset, a handsome blond woman, may be
the only mud-logger in the state to wear
gold earrings and a cashmere cardigan
sweater on a rig. She had arrived in the Wil-
liston Basin in 1979, after she graduated
from Brown with a geology degree. “I re-
member Meridian Exploration coming in
the eighties and trying to drill an early hor-
izontal,” she said. “Horizontal was so secre-
tive then. They sent a guy out here with a
briefcase of drilling instructions and he
wouldn’t let it leave his hand.” She said the
most difficult part now isn’t finding the pay
zone but staying in it for the length of the
lateral. “The Middle Bakken doesn’t follow
a truly flat line, because there are up-dips
and down-dips—a wavy line,” Neset said. “If
the bit moves out of the pay and you’re get-
ting back Oreo-cookie shales instead of the
center, it’s tough to know if you need to
correct high or correct low.” If you miss your
target, a driller on the Boots said, “you have
to bring out your ‘big gray eraser.’ That’s ce-
ment.”
W hen Brigham entered the Bakken, its
staff was made up mostly of explora-
tion men—geologists and geophysicists—
and some of them dismissed resource plays
as the abandonment of the wildcatter spirit;
Jeff Larson, the Brigham explorationist, de-
rided the engineering work as “a lot of block-
ing and tackling.” Rankin was assigned to
the Bakken project because he was one of
only half a dozen engineers at the company.
To complement his technical knowledge, he
hoped to enlist Mitchel Brown, a freelance
horizontal-drilling expert he had worked
with briefly a decade earlier.
Brown is a sawed-off shotgun of a man,
with a high, excitable voice and mis-
matched eyes—one blue and one egg-
plant-colored, since an accident, in 1990,
when a hose on a rig collapsed and sprayed
hydraulic fluid in his face. “Shredded iris
and retinal detachment,” he told me. “Four
months’ workers’ comp.” Brown held his
first job on a rig at fourteen, in Oklahoma,
where his father was a professional trap-
shooter. Later, on deployments to Alaska,
the Ivory Coast, and the Indian Ocean, he
specialized in snubbing—forcing pipe into
a well, against pressure, to perform repairs.
Now, with his own consulting business, he
earns more than three hundred thousand
dollars a year, working eight or nine
months. At first, Brown wasn’t interested
in joining Rankin in North Dakota. “It’s
too cold,” he said. But he finally assented.
He had been hearing about the unreal-
ized potential of the Williston Basin, he
said, and “I decided I like a challenge.”
The two of them made an odd couple.
Where Rankin obsessed over weights and
measures, Brown, who is forty-five, relied on
an intuitive ability to visualize the physical
relationship a wellbore has to its setting.
“You’ve got to put yourself in the hole,” he
told me. “I had an old guy tell me that once,
and I thought, Now, how the hell does he do
that?” He once ran a video camera down a
wire to diagnose a damaged well. “It was just
like your eyeball was in the wellbore. The
water was flooding right past.” Brown
described Rankin as “one of the most open-
minded drilling engineers I’ve met”—a
rather backhanded compliment. But, he ac-
knowledged, “Russell is one of those people
that can put himself in the hole.”
Both men were frustrated by their initial
drilling in the Bakken. “I fought with the first
few wells,” Brown said. He worried that
Brigham was going to pull out, and told
Rankin to let his boss know that they needed
time and money to experiment. Brigham
agreed to budget them sixty million dollars
for a year of drilling. Brown and his wife,
Helen, moved their R.V. from Oklahoma to
Williston, and, eventually, his son and son-
in-law joined them. “We’re gypsies, anyway,”
Helen Brown told me.
The low production of the wells, Brown
said, indicated a need for not only more
muscle but also more precision. They were
trying to frack the entire lateral portion of
the wellbore at once, with a single burst of
pressurized fluid. Rankin explained, “The
action is ten thousand feet underground,
and you have no idea where in the whole
thing the fractures are.”
To solve this problem, operators had at-
tempted to divide a wellbore into segments,
using fibreglass plugs, so that each stage
could be fractured separately. But multi-
stage fracks were unreliable, Brown said:
“People called them fancy fracks, because
they cost more but didn’t work.” Plugs got
stuck in the well, or they failed to hold their
place. He added, “You’d try them and still
couldn’t be sure if they did a damn thing.”
Indeed, the next four wells that he and
Rankin built in 2006 used seven stages each,
but their production was not si-
gnificantly better.
That summer, word spread through the
basin that EOG Resources, a company from
Houston, had sunk an enormous well seventy
miles southeast of Williston. When EOG
submitted the results to the state, as required
by law, Rankin saw that the well had an ini-
tial production estimate of about a thousand
barrels a day—and that it had been fractured
in five stages. EOG had pulled off a fancy
frack better than anybody else. But how?
“Their guys are very tight-lipped, and for a
while nobody could find out,” Rankin said.
The oil industry accepts a certain amount
of corporate espionage as part of doing busi-
ness: companies spy on one another’s wells to
see which areas are producing and what
methods work. The Brigham land depart-
ment began to follow where EOG was leas-
ing, and obtained the rights to small portions
on the same lots—sometimes as little as an
acre within a two-square-mile parcel. Be-
cause the two companies technically shared
the lots, EOG was legally obligated to allow
Brigham to buy into its wells—and thus had
to provide details of how the wells were ad-
ministered. “They still weren’t easy,” Rankin
recalled. “I’d ask for their report and I’d get,
‘Oh, I have a call in on that,’ or ‘Let me see if
it’s ready yet.’ But eventually they have to
comply.”
It took a year for EOG’s secret to emerge.
“We found out they were using swell pack-
ers” to divide the well into sections, Brown
said. Swell packers are spongelike tubes, not
much larger than a rolling pin, coated in a
rubber compound that swells when it comes
into contact with hydrocarbons. As they ex-
pand, they seal the wellbore more effi-
ciently, increasing the pressure of the frack-
ing fluid. “We went and redid an early well
that we’d abandoned—as a seven-frack in-
stead of a one-frack—using the swell pack-
ers,” Lance Langford, a Brigham executive,
said. The cost of the well went up by fifty per
cent, but its production increased nearly
fourfold. “When we saw the flow, we shut it
down after six hours,” Langford said. “We
didn’t want anybody to see how big the flare
was until we bought up more acres.”
Brown and Rankin’s wells continued to
utilize more stages—ten, twelve, and more.
Rankin said, “The wells weren’t getting lon-
ger—the frack sections were getting shorter.”
Their production rate jumped again when
they extended the horizontal section of the
wellbore from five thousand feet to ten thou-
sand and continued adding more frack sec-
tions. Rankin said, “A year ago, people said it
was too risky to have a twenty-frack job. Now
we’re doing forty.” Last year, Brigham’s wells
had an average initial production rate of
nearly three thousand barrels a day—the
highest among its competitors. The utility of
combining a multi-frack with a long lateral
has become an article of faith in the Bakken.
“Now everybody here copycats us on that,”
Rankin said.
T he public playground in the middle of
Williston recently underwent a four-
hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar upgrade,
courtesy of the oil companies.The new equip-
ment includes a jungle gym with towers de-
signed to look like Halliburton oil derricks, a
seesaw that resembles a Brigham pump jack,
and a tunnel for children to crawl in that bears
the name and logo of Enbridge, a pipeline op-
erator. Williston’s downtown is quiet—a
dingy precinct of Victorian-era limestone
storefronts—but the business routes that
stretch toward the drilling fields are lined with
proliferating warehouses, dispatching centers,
and equipment showrooms. Kyle Hexom,
whose family owns a well-site-construction
business, told me, “Between booms, there
were some really lean times for my dad.” Now,
he said, the company didn’t have enough
trucks for the jobs it was offered.
The town’s population has grown in the
past decade from twelve thousand to fifteen
thousand, overwhelming Williston’s housing
stock. “We’ve got two new developments
that are being built,” Ward Koeser, the town’s
mayor, said one morning at city hall. “The rest
of what we want to do for now is a combina-
tion of short-term residences and medium-
term.” These are euphemisms for “man
camps”: motels or clusters of trailers that
house laborers in large numbers. Eight have
recently gone up around Williston.
The man camps are a source of some ten-
sion between the oil industry and established
residents—the Williston Herald regularly gets
comments from readers lamenting the town’s
“ghettos” and their constituency of “oil-field
trash.” But they are a familiar sight in Willis-
ton, and workers say that the atmosphere is
largely peaceful. “In your twelve hours off, after
you do your clothes and eat supper, all you do
is sleep anyway,” Jon Grounds, who lives in a
three-hundred-bed camp, said. He was walk-
ing from his quarters—a long trailer contain-
ing twenty single rooms, each with a flat-
screen TV mounted above the bed—to the
chow hall. Grounds, who is thirty, works as a
roughneck for fourteen consecutive days, then
drives several hours to Zap, North Dakota, to
spend two weeks at home. “It’s not that hard—
except when you’re up on the rig you’ve got to
eat a sandwich on a string,” he said. “I think
I’m gonna make a career out of it.”
Leaving aside the risk of auditory dam-
age—hearing aids are ubiquitous among rig
workers over forty—and the threat of injury
from mishandled explosives, the work is at-
tractive. Sammy Farnham, a lanky, red-faced
man who operates perforating guns, arrived
with his wife three years ago, when he was
having a hard time finding construction work
in South Carolina. “We got here on a Satur-
day, and I had a job Tuesday morning,” he said.
Farnham made seventy thousand dollars in
the first five months of the year and was ex-
pecting two bonus payouts of as much as thirty
thousand dollars each, “when things get really
busy.” He had already paid off his house and
car. “My manager made three hundred and
twenty thousand dollars last year, just for run-
ning the truck.”
One afternoon, as Rankin and I drove
through the Parshall oil field, east of Willis-
ton, he pointed out a big contempo-
rary house with a vaulted glass entry-
way. “New home,” he said. “New car, new
boat. New wife, probably.” Residents claim
that Bakken money has largely been spent on
modes of transport or reinvested in the land.
More than one person expressed interest in
buying a new combine, which can cost three
hundred thousand dollars. Richard Nelson, a
sixty-six-year-old construction company em-
ployee, told me that he’d started playing min-
eral rights when they were a dollar an acre.
“Now,” he said, “I’ve got a few acres with mul-
tiple wells. I could show you some checks in
my car.”
Much of the basin is under contract, but
people who still hold parcels can lease out
their mineral rights for annual payments of as
much as three thousand dollars per acre, in ad-
dition to a twenty-per-cent stake in the oil
that’s produced. A moderately productive plot
of two square miles could bring the owners—
typically, groups of relatives and speculators—
a million dollars up front, and five hundred
thousand dollars a year for two decades. Ron
Gerwien, who owns a sandblasting operation,
said that “a changing of the weather” occurred
when a major oil field began producing near
Stanley, an hour’s drive from Williston. “Up
until now, the two families that had all the
money were always the banker and the tele-
phone-company operator.”
The intermediaries whom oil companies
rely on during mineral-rights transactions
are called land men. Brigham’s land depart-
ment moved a team of seventy to Williston,
and also keeps a local man named John
Schmitz on retainer to handle sensitive land
deals with townspeople. “I don’t do geol-
ogy—I do clan-ology,” Schmitz told me one
evening, when he and his wife, Cathy,
brought me to their country club for dinner.
“I’m third-generation Williston, from a
wheat farm, just like them.” Brigham called
on him when an agreement with Abe
Owan was endangered. Apparently, a young
in-house land man, up from Texas, had
tried to fast-talk Owan into accepting a low
payment. Owan asked him to leave the
premises. Cathy said, “The good-ol’-boy
shit is not going to work here.”
“Abe knew my dad for decades,” Schmitz
said. “He insisted on a higher price than I was
allowed to say yes to, but I knew he wouldn’t
go lower.” Brigham assented, and Schmitz
closed the deal.
Both Schmitzes were standout athletes at
Williston High, and Cathy is a prominent law-
yer in town. “I started buying minerals for my-
self after the second boom, when nobody
wanted them,” Schmitz said. “I had a hunch it
wasn’t done yet.” He began by courting the
neighbors of his old family farm, which over-
looks the Missouri River. “I knew these people,
and none of them were particularly wealthy,”
he said. “I would tell them to sell me half and
keep half for themselves.”
“It literally is free money,” Cathy said.
O ilmen often attribute the accelerated
growth in the Bakken to what Bud
Brigham calls North Dakota’s “conducive
regulatory climate.” Hydraulic fracturing has
become enormously controversial, and other
plays throughout the country are being
slowed by concerns that fracking accidents
have contaminated drinking water. “Gasland,”
an anti-fracking documentary that was nom-
inated for an Oscar this year, showed resi-
dents of Colorado whose tap water contained
so much methane gas—apparently from
leaking wells underfoot—that a cigarette
lighter held to a spigot set the water
on fire.The Environmental Protection Agen-
cy’s last official study of fracking, in 2004,
concluded that it poses “little or no threat” to
water-supply safety, but the report was faulted
for relying too heavily on scientists employed
by the oil industry. The agency set up a new
study and expects to deliver its initial results
by the end of 2012.
Fracking’s public image has probably not
been helped by a regulatory loophole that,
until recently, enabled the producers of frac-
turing fluid to keep its contents secret. Ac-
cording to a study commissioned last year by
Tudor Pickering Holt, an investment bank
that focusses on the energy industry, the
fluid is “99.5 percent water.” The rest is a
combination of, among other substances,
guar gum (used in cosmetics and ice cream),
isopropanol (glass cleaner), potassium chlo-
ride (salt substitute), ethylene glycol (anti-
freeze), and various acids used to clean
swimming pools.
Proponents point out that hydraulic frac-
turing has been common in oil fields for
sixty years and is currently used in perhaps
eighty per cent of America’s gas wells. “The
use of old, poorly cemented wells—not
fracking—is what can cause stray gas to leak
into the water supply,”Terry Engelder, a ge-
ologist at Penn State who has often de-
fended the technique, told me. “That’s some-
thing you’ ll find with any type of
underground well, even a water well.” How-
ever, “there have been instances of chemicals
spilling in aboveground accidents,” he said.
“The industry has to do a better job of mit-
igating risk.”
Lynn Helms, the chief mineral-re-
sources regulator in North Dakota, told me,
“There are some legitimate risks to simply
getting frack chemicals to the well. You’ve
got thirty gallons of biohazard at a well site
that can be very dangerous in its concen-
trated form.” In November, after there
were two spills at well sites in North Da-
kota (neither of which, apparently, con-
taminated the public water supply), Helms
requested funding to hire twenty additional
inspectors.
On the other hand, Helms said, because
the fracturing of the Bakken formation takes
place nearly two miles below the aquifers, the
risk of underground contamination is “as
close to scientifically impossible as anything
can be said to be.” Even some of the state’s
most prominent opponents of fracking con-
cede as much, and, in any case, their concerns
are outmatched by the prospect of so much
oil money. “Oil is very popular, and the econ-
omy here is a long-suffering agricultural
economy,” Mark Trechock, the director of the
Dakota Resource Council, said; the council
has frequently called for fracking to be more
strictly regulated.
Since the U.S.G.S. study in 2008, further
estimates have begun to bear out Leigh
Price’s figures, suggesting total reserves of as
much as three hundred billion barrels
and,perhaps more important, increasingly
optimistic recovery rates, which have swelled
from one per cent to as much as ten per cent.
“We’ve seen a massive change in just the past
few months,” Stephen Richardson, an en-
ergy-business analyst at Morgan Stan-
ley, said. “It’s the maturation of the play: twice
as many rigs as a year ago.”
Pete Stark, a geologist at the energy-
consulting firm IHS, recently forecast that
the output of the Williston Basin will dou-
ble in the next five years. “We may not find
another Bakken, but the techniques have
led us into seven or eight new oil plays,” in
Texas, Colorado, and elsewhere, Stark said.
Taken together, the new reservoirs are ex-
pected to raise domestic production by as
much as two million barrels a day. “That’s
not quite energy security, but suddenly now
you’re talking about an offset of twenty per
cent of imported crude,” Stark said. “Every
oil company in the country is looking at
their source rock to see if they can crack the Inside the “Central Command” trailer, where the fracking crew monitors the process. An engineer explained, “Pumping fractures rock. Fluid invades fracks. Oil comes to Papa.”
code.”
and snacks for the twelve-hour shift: leaned over the wellhead and unceremoni- earlier by the guns. “You know the rest. encountered the plug, a computerized graph
B ack at the Abe well, a radio system
that connected the vehicles came on:
“Pressure’s up. We’re ready to start the frack.”
Goldfish, lemon coolers, peanut butter, a bag
of precooked shrimp.
Outside, fracking equipment surrounded
ously dropped in a black plastic ball not
much bigger than a walnut. “Down the
hole,” Rankin said. The ball was going to
Pumping fractures rock. Fluid invades
fracks. Oil comes to Papa.”
Something called “slick water” was the
indicated that pressure inside the well was
spiking. Two workers pushed buttons that
sent about twenty tons of proppant sand
Rankin flung open the heavy door of a the hole in the ground in a tableau that re- be swept through the wellbore until, first substance poured in. “It’s got an addi- from a bus-size bin into the wellhead. The
trailer marked “Central Command” and sembled a split lobster: at the perimeter, within the hour, its path was blocked by a tive that cuts down on friction, so it moves sand would be flushed into the fractures and
took his place beside five members of the the hard red shell of trucks bearing triplex fibreglass plug. “The ball will seat there and faster,” Rankin said. One computer screen would hold them open. In about fifteen
fracturing crew. They wore red jumpsuits pumps, mixers, and tanks; in the middle, begin to divert the frack fluid,” he ex- listed, in various colors, the concentration minutes, pressure started falling off again.
and headsets, and they sat before a desk con- the dirty green guts, composed of inter- plained. Then the fluid would enter the levels of the compounds that would be “That means the sand is hitting the perfs,”
taining a double row of computer monitors coiled pipes, hoses, and valves. A worker rock formation via the perforations made mixed into the slurry. When the ball Rankin said.
 Outside, night was falling, and a set of
portable stadium lights came on. Rankin
had his men gradually increase the fluid’s
viscosity and the diameter of the grains of
proppant, to create a better conduit for the
oil to flow back out. “I like to bring it up
from about a lotion to a molasses,” Rankin
said. Every time he altered the mixture, a
first-year worker—a “worm,” distinguished
by his green hard hat—appeared, bearing a
fresh sample in a plastic cup, and performed
a test. First, he tilted the cup so that the frack
fluid formed a rubbery lip, a couple of inches
long, that hung suspended in air. Then he
touched the lip to Rankin’s hand, to see that
his skin remained dry. Finally, he flipped the
sample into another cup and checked that
no traces remained in the first. By the time
the concentration was at its highest level, the
fluid was like an elastic peanut butter and
could hold a lip nearly as tall as the cup.
“That’s a Gene Simmons tongue,” Rankin
said approvingly.
In another week, after the fracturing
trucks were moved off, the Abe under-
went three days of “flowback” treatment,
to pump out the fracking fluid before oil
recovery began. The first night, employees
saw flares ten feet tall rising from the well.
“If there’s that much gas running through
it before you’re even pumping oil, usually
you’re getting a good well,” Rankin said.
The well came on line with an initial pro-
duction of 1,847 barrels a day. “I’d say
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we’re very pleased,” Rankin said.
T he land the Abe well runs beneath was
once inhabited by a Norwegian family
named Ellingson, which claimed six adja-
cent homestead plots. I learned from a visit
to the records vault of the county courthouse
that in 1907 the U.S. government had
deeded a hundred and sixty acres to Ed El-
lingson for the sum of two hundred dollars.
Soon, four of his brothers—Sievert, Albert,
Miller, and Ole—settled around him.
Life on the frontier was hard. In 1913,
Ed was killed by a passing train as he tried
to shoo cattle off the tracks. His father got
his estate: the land, plus “one horse named
Cooley, one old binder, household furniture,
one old wagon, one bobsled, one hay rake,
and blacksmith tools,” according to a type-
written deed. Sievert’s wife died the same
year, while he was working in the fields.
Sievert wanted to build up a herd of Here-
fords, “but the drought made all pastures
inadequate,” his son, Elmer, explained in an
account published in 1975 by the county
historical society. “Crops failed repeatedly. .
. . There were years we had to borrow money
for seed grain.” Eventually, Sievert, his
brother Miller, and their families moved to
Minnesota. Another brother, Albert, ended
up with many of the family’s acres but failed
to pay taxes on his property, and in 1942 it
was repossessed by the government.
The land seemed to have given the
special reprint
®
Ellingsons little in return for their labor. But
the last court filing, dated March, 2010—
just a month before Brigham’s drilling rig
was in place—revealed that there was a
holdout: a young housewife and mother
who lives in Williston. (The woman asked
not to be named, in order to maintain her
privacy.) She was a descendant of Ole El-
lingson, one of the five original homestead-
ing brothers, whose family had retained a
large share of mineral rights even after much
of the property was seized.
The woman and two siblings had been
given the rights by their grandmother, an
Ellingson widow. “I didn’t hear much about
North Dakota from my grandmother grow-
ing up—she moved out of the state when I
was very young, when her first husband
passed away,” she said. The woman leased
the rights to Brigham. The arrangement will
likely pay the family several hundred thou-
sand dollars a year.
The family had attempted to sell the
rights once before. “Around ’98 or ’99, my
grandmother had a couple of medical pro-
cedures,” the woman said. “She was going
through a financially difficult time.” The
only buyer her grandmother could suggest
was a tenant farmer who was taking care of
the land. “I called the gentleman, but he
wasn’t interested,” the woman said. “She was
asking ten thousand dollars. I guess I can see
how it didn’t sound like such a great deal at
the time.” 