That’s because in most states, the surface land and the minerals underneath are sold together, but in North Dakota and states such as Texas and Oklahoma, where oil and gas development has occurred, the majority of the minerals have been severed. In North Dakota, most landowners sold off their mineral rights at some point because they didn’t know what the rights were worth or they were desperate for cash. Historically, the average household income in North Dakota has been one of the lowest in the nation, and when someone knocked on a struggling family’s door offering to pay them a handful of cash for mineral rights they didn’t even know they had, the proposition was difficult to pass up. Today, only about one in five surface owners in North Dakota actually owns the minerals beneath them.
Under North Dakota law, mineral rights trump the land rights of surface owners, so essentially people who live out of state but have North Dakotan ancestors can receive a notice in the mail that they own 500 acres of minerals, making them overnight millionaires. In contrast, the people who bought the surface land without the mineral rights would receive a one-time payment of maybe $3,000 for “temporary land loss,” and get none of the profits, despite dealing with drilling crews, truck traffic, dust, possible drinking water and soil contamination, air pollution, and loss of property value. And even those 25 percent of landowners who own mineral rights would have a difficult time keeping oil companies off their land—oil companies have many legal strategies to gain access, and state laws tend to favor the companies.
The state’s mineral laws meant that much of the wealth being created by the energy boom was being unequally distributed. One farmer near Williston said he named the oil well on his land “the hamburger well,” because it earned him enough money to buy one hamburger a month, whereas retired farmer and rancher Lenin Dibble received royalty checks of nearly $1 million a year for his share of mineral rights. Nelson’s friends, the Jorgensons, had no idea they didn’t own the mineral rights under the 40 acres around their house and were shocked to find out that 110 strangers owned them. When oil companies came to drill, all the Jorgensons could do was stand by and watch.
Nelson owned a handful of the mineral rights underneath his land—but not enough to stop the oil companies from barging in and setting up camp. Because his land had been divided up and sold so many times, his mineral rights were jumbled together with those of others. And if 51 percent of the mineral owners on a 1,280-acre plot allowed drilling, all of them had to do so. Nelson owned some minerals around his farmhouse, however, so he was able to negotiate how close to his home oil companies could place a well. The companies had to keep wells about a mile away from his house, though they could still technically drill under his house, once they were thousands of feet below. Nelson received a sizable check each month from his share of royalties from four different wells, though if the wells started producing less or stopped altogether, so would the checks. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘Why are you complaining? You’re getting money,’ and I say, ‘Money doesn’t make stuff right.’”
Anyone who wanted to fight back faced extraordinary legal fees. Negotiating a lease was a long and cumbersome process. Oil companies knew they could almost always outspend farmers and drag out legal proceedings to an unaffordable point. Nelson originally took his lease to a lawyer, but only a few in the area dealt with minerals, and since thousands of farmers were in the same situation, most were completely overwhelmed. Nelson could tell immediately that the lawyer put little care into his lease negotiation. Landowners with enough mineral rights also had the option of “going down the hole” with the oil company and sharing the profits, but this option required landowners to pay for the initial drilling costs, which could run upward of $10 million. “A lot of people throw up their hands and take what they give you,” said Nelson.
All Nelson wanted now was a break—a break from the noise, the trucks, the phone calls from oil companies that started at 9 a.m. nearly every day, and the dust that billowed up every time a semi truck passed. He wanted his old life back.
* * *
The biggest mistake I made when I met Donny Nelson at his farm was bringing wine.
I don’t know what I was thinking.
Donny drinks Bud Light or whiskey, not wine. Rena Nelson, his wife, doesn’t like wine either. Donny showed me the handle of Jack Daniel’s sitting in his freezer.
Donny is about as American West as you can get. Behind a bushy handlebar mustache, prominent lines carve deep into his tan skin when he smiles—almost as if he collects them, with each one representing the passing of another season and harvest. On most summer days, when temperatures rarely exceeded 70 degrees, Donny wore a short-sleeve vintage Western shirt with pearled snap buttons, Wranglers, and a hat to protect him from the elements. His favorite seemed to be a dust-covered Feiring Cattle Company cap with faded fabric on the rim. With few trees in sight, the blazing sun seemed to reach every crevice of land, and the wind could pick up without notice.
He lived with his wife in a two-story log house that he built himself when he was still a bachelor. He bought the logs from a neighbor, dug the basement by himself in the summer of 1996 and, with the help of friends and family, spent a year and a half building the house. The deep pine logs flanked the interior of the house. The stairway and second-floor balcony were lined with railings made from smooth juniper cedar that Donny recycled from old fence posts. The farmhouse sat at the bottom of a hill, shielded by small hills on either side. When you left his driveway and reached the dirt road, you were met with a skyline cluttered with a half-dozen oil wells. Beyond them was one of Donny’s favorite spots—a butte that was the tallest land formation for miles, named Thunder Butte by the Native Americans.
Donny’s farm was once part of the nearby Fort Berthold Indian Reservation before it was opened for homesteading. Donny attended school on the reservation in New Town because it was the closest school to his house. About half the students in his class were Caucasian homesteaders and half were Native Americans. “I’ve always had a good relationship with most of them,” he said. “We have a lot of the same ideals.”
Like most North Dakotans, Donny liked to hunt. Pheasants were his favorite, but he didn’t mind shooting the occasional coyote (he pronounces it “cay-oat”) that wandered onto his property. An elk head peered down onto his dining room table, and he kept a .220 Swift rifle in his truck. In his workshop was a sign that read VEGETARIAN: THE INDIAN WORD FOR LOUSY HUNTER. When I asked how many guns he owned, he said, “Let’s just say I have plenty.” Maybe because they shared a last name, he listened to a lot of Willie Nelson.
Donny was a bachelor until five or six years ago when he met Rena, a woman who grew up nearby in the small town of Watford City and worked at the local police department. They met at the annual steak and lobster festival dance in town, and she gave him her number. “I intended to call her, but then I got busy,” he said. Donny didn’t see her again until almost a year later when they ran into each other at another dance. After that, he finally called her.
Donny didn’t use a laptop, and his computer was at least a decade old. He used a landline or an old flip phone to make phone calls. Since there was no cell phone reception at the farmhouse, he drove to the top of a hill to talk. He laughed when I asked if he was on Facebook, and he only recently purchased a TV. “It’s nice, but now I can’t get nothin’ done,” he said as we flipped through channels one night. One of his farm vehicles was a 1978 pickup truck with no muffler and no seat belts. “This truck’d be illegal in California,” his 25-year-old farmhand, Adam, told me.
Donny traveled around when he was younger. After graduating from college with a degree in agricultural economics, he went to Australia to work on a sheep and cattle farm for six months, but quickly realized his farm in North Dakota was where he wanted to be. “Even while I was in Australia, it was pretty cemented in my mind that farming here was what I wanted to do,” he said. “Once you get away from home and see other places and compare it to where you’re from, I thoug
ht, ‘We live in a pretty good place.’” He also traveled to Los Angeles once with Rena to visit friends and immediately decided the city was not for him. “We felt like a buncha hicks,” he said, laughing. “I can’t believe we survived.”
His “pretty good place,” however, was known among U.S. farmers for its extremely harsh conditions, and other farmers might run back to their (literally) greener pastures. The land here was unforgiving; a place where few crops could flourish except for robust grains, such as barley and durum wheat. The average rainfall was only about 17 inches, half the amount Iowa and Kansas received, and only a few inches more than New Mexico. The weather could be extreme and unpredictable. For most of December, January, and February, it was cold enough to freeze your nostril hairs as soon as you stepped outside. Droughts were frequent, with many scientists predicting that the drought cycle would become more severe in the coming years. While I lived in North Dakota during the summer of 2013, I experienced hailstorms with bouncy-ball-size pellets raining down on me, 60-mile-an-hour winds, and tornado warnings—all of which could completely take out a farmer’s crop for the year. “In the end we don’t own the land,” said Donny. “It owns us.”
13. CINDY MARCHELLO
There are three main steps to the shale oil extraction process: drilling, fracking, and completion. Cindy Marchello and her crew worked during the completion stage. But a lot had to happen before they arrived.
Step one is drilling. A drilling crew builds a towering 120-foot derrick as the support structure for the drill. Crew members use a diamond drill bit, hard enough to break through rock layers that can be 50 feet thick, and attach it to the end of a 90-foot pipe and bore into the ground, feeding more pipe as they go. They use drilling mud, mixed with diesel fuel, synthetic oil, and other chemical additives (the mixture is unique to each company, but ethylene glycol, a highly toxic chemical used in antifreeze, is commonly used) to keep the drill bit cool in the hole. They drill through the water aquifer (typically no deeper than 2,000 feet in western North Dakota) and continue drilling about 10,000 feet (or about the distance of seven Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other), until they reach the Bakken shale formation. Once they hit bottom, they drill the “bend,” a 90-degree turn that allows them to drill horizontally another 5,000 to 10,000 feet. This giant L-shaped hole in the ground, about three feet wide, is the well. Afterward, workers encase the top portion of the well with cement, pouring it down the sides of the pipe to create a leakage barrier—though the process is not always successful. Documented cases of leaks have occurred in Pennsylvania, where underground gases have migrated up the sides of wells.
Drillers are able to tunnel into the ground with impressive accuracy, typically staying within 10 feet of the target path, and the time it takes to drill a well continues to decrease. It took about 40 to 60 days to drill a well in the early stages of the Bakken development, but by 2013, some wells were being drilled in as few as nine days. After drilling, the rig is packed up and moved to the next drill site before a wireline crew and a fracking crew arrives.
The wireline crew, colloquially known as gun hands, tosses explosives down the hole to blow small perforations in the pipe with shrapnel pieces, which allows gas and oil to seep through. Not surprisingly, this is one of the most dangerous jobs in the oil field. Crew members on site have to turn off all cell phones and electronic devices during the perforating process to avoid triggering the explosives. The horizontal section of a well is divided into 20 or 30 zones. Each zone is isolated by using rubber stoppers, or “plugs,” and must be perforated and fracked separately. The wireline crew blows holes in the first zone, then stands by for the frack crew.
The frack crew brings an in army of trucks and heavy machinery. This step requires about 6 to 12 pumps, some 3 million to 5 million gallons of water (enough to sustain an American family for 34 years), and 2,000 truck trips from the water depot to transport it all. Often the crew builds a 1.8-million-gallon tank nearby to store some of the water, or brings in dozens of smaller tanks. About 1.5 million to 6 million pounds of sand also are needed, nearly enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. The sand isn’t the kind you find on a beach. Sometimes it’s manufactured ceramic pellets shipped in from China; other times it comes from quartz-rich sandstone mines in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The whole system of pipes, pumps, storage tanks, and trucks extends over an area about the size of two football fields. Fracking crews are made up of about 30 people and tend to have a lot of new arrivals. Since so many frack hands are needed, it’s typically someone’s first job in the oil field. Scott Morgan, Marchello’s coworker, calls them “punk-ass kids.” “If you can drive a truck and chew gum, and if you can say ‘yes sir, no sir,’ you can be an all-star fracker,” he said.
The crew attaches a blow-out preventer to regulate the pressure at the well head, then it blasts sand mixed with “slick water” down the hole with some 9,000 pounds of pressure per square inch—enough to shatter the shale surrounding the pipe. The liquid is called slick water because the actual texture is slimy—it contains 98 percent water but is mixed with a long list of chemicals, some highly toxic, and the combination of which is proprietary. The pressure forces the sand and slick water through the perforations in the pipe to create fissures in the rock. Crews pump 840 to 1,680 gallons of sand per minute down a conveyor belt. The sand fills in where the rock was eaten away by chemicals and acts as a spacer for the oil to seep through.
Once the fissures have been created, a mixture of slick water, sand, oil, natural gas, and naturally occurring saltwater known as flowback begins flowing back out of the well. This flowback has to be separated and divided into barrels. The water and sand are sent to a disposal well; the gas is flared, piped, or trucked away; and the oil goes to a refinery. The wireline crew then returns to perforate the next zone. The entire process can take 20 hours to three days, depending on how many delays occur.
As soon as the fracking team finishes with the last zone in a well, the completion phase begins, and Marchello and her coil tubing crew clean out the plugs and excess sand to help the oil flow. A coil crew is also called if a well suddenly isn’t producing as much oil as expected—its job is to figure out why, just as a plumber diagnoses a clogged sink. “We try to wake it back up,” explained Marchello. The coil crew trucks in a spool of 24,500 feet of bendable steel pipe, which would stretch nearly to the top of Mount Everest if rolled out, to send down the well. It takes skill and caution to keep the pipe steady and level while feeding it down the hole. “It’s like squeezing a wet noodle through a straw,” said Morgan. The coil tubing method is more efficient than other methods involving disjointed pipe segments that have to be individually fed down the hole. Once the pipe is set, the crew pumps in slick water and nitrogen gas to help lift debris and plugs out of the well.
Coil tubing requires more technical skill than some of the other jobs, and the crew is smaller, usually only six workers on site at a time. If everything goes smoothly, the job takes about six hours to two days, depending on the well depth. But there are frequently delays and setbacks. After the crew is finished, another crew installs a pumpjack to keep oil pumping up to the surface.
I asked Cindy Marchello if I could go to a job site with her, but she shook her head. She’d have to get permission from upper management, and, in general, oil companies were secretive and didn’t like journalists poking around. She could get fired if she snuck me onto a site and her manager found out, but she said she’d ask for me. She did, however, manage to procure one of her old hard hats and coveralls for me “just in case” I managed to get clearance. On location, workers had to wear fire-resistant coveralls and gloves, a hard hat, and steel-toed boots. The steel theoretically would protect my feet from being chopped off or crushed if anything were to fall on them, but the tiny piece of metal on the boot’s toe was hardly reassuring.
As I worked on gaining access to a well site, Marchello was becoming my window into the male-dominated world of the
oil field. A month after we met, Marchello invited me to her man camp to meet her crew. They were in between jobs and had a rare day off. My photographer, Brad, was staying with me that week and tagged along.
We met Marchello and a male coworker in her trailer. The man introduced himself as Curtis Kenney. Kenney was short with narrow eyes, scruffy facial hair, and a receding hairline. He and Marchello seemed friendly with each other, but they sat on opposite sides of the room.
Kenney was an ex-felon from a tiny town 40 miles south of the Canadian border in northern Washington that had “about 100 people in it when everybody has company over,” he said. He previously worked in logging but came to the oil field in 2010 after he lost his job. He had a wife, Anna Marie, who lived in Washington and had Parkinson’s disease, and three grown kids. At 48, Kenney was one of the oldest guys on the crew. Everyone else, besides Marchello, was in their 20s or 30s.
Kenney and Marchello met when they both worked for Halliburton. The boss at the time put Marchello on Kenney’s crew to punish him, and Kenney supervised her. He spoke about the time fondly. “A lot of new guys under me would take four hours to find a hammer; I couldn’t trust them to do anything. But I could ask her and she’d get it done,” he said, looking over at her.
Marchello and Kenney discussed how their jobs worked. But with Marchello’s speed talking, Kenney attempting to talk over her, and oil field jargon mixed in—terms like “snubbers,” “goosenecks,” “wet kits,” and “duck ponds”—my notes looked like hieroglyphics afterward. I had to interrupt to ask what they meant every few minutes.
Kenney turned to Brad. “If I told you to go get a stripper, what would you do?”
Brad seemed stunned by the question. “Uh…”
Marchello laughed. “It’s a tool.”
Kenney looked pleased with himself for stumping Brad. “Everybody’s wife says, what are you doing getting strippers?”
The New Wild West Page 7