The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  “One time someone asked me what I was doing,” Marchello said. “‘I’m driving the truck because our stripper died,’ I said. They were, like, ‘Whaaat?’”

  Kenney explained that a stripper is a rubber disk surrounding the coil tubing to “strip” away mud as the tube came out of the hole.

  At one point, Kenney puffed up his chest and claimed he’d been “the deepest anyone had ever been in the Bakken.”

  Marchello nodded her head. “It’s a big brag.”

  I asked them to explain. Kenney said on one job, their equipment went more than 20,000 feet into the earth, whereas most wells stopped around 10,000 to 15,000 feet. He took out a photo of the computer reading and showed it to me. REAL DEPTH 20193.23 FT, the numbers read.

  Kenney and Marchello discussed how much they hated living in Williston. “There’s a certain amount of riffraff here,” Kenney said. “I wouldn’t want this to happen to my hometown. The locals aren’t nice here anymore.”

  Marchello nodded in agreement. “People are so tired. There’s too much driving, waiting in line.”

  When they were out on a well site, they were told not to talk to the farmers. That job was for a “landman,” the person who negotiated mineral rights contracts with landowners. “It’s their job to keep the farmers happy, though they’re not always successful,” said Kenney. So for the most part, he and Marchello kept their distance from the locals, many of whom resented their presence.

  As Marchello talked, I watched her and thought that she didn’t seem 56 years old. It wasn’t that she didn’t look her age, but her mannerisms made her seem like she was in her 20s. There was a youthful cuteness to her. The way she became excited when she talked. Her rosy cheeks. Her laugh. I suspected this made her a target for many men’s affections. I made a note to ask her if any crew members had crushes on her when Kenney wasn’t in the room.

  I was glad I saved the question. Because her biggest admirer, I found out later, was Kenney himself.

  Marchello said she wanted to introduce me to the rest of the crew, especially a man named Mana Kula who was a field supervisor at C&J Energy Services and the leader of their crew. Marchello had met Kula two years earlier when they worked together at a company called Cudd. We walked down the dirt path to trailer number 33 and Marchello knocked on the door. A Polynesian man opened it and she asked if Mana was home. The man invited us in. The room appeared much smaller than Marchello’s trailer due to the many large men who were crowded into it.

  One man introduced himself as Mana Kula, and I immediately understood why he had influence over the group. He was one of the largest men I’d ever seen. He towered over me, and was almost as wide as he was tall. His head was the size of a beach ball, and he had tan Polynesian skin and thick, silky black hair that framed his face in curly ringlets. His hands looked like they could wrap around mine three times. When he laughed, the entire trailer shook.

  I also met Tui, who was married to Kula’s older sister. Tui came to the oil field after his flooring contract business in California went bankrupt during the recession. He had nine children back home to support. A man named Larry stood next to him—Larry had worked with Kula at a previous company and was from California as well.

  Marchello explained that Kula had taught her how to play poker, specifically Texas Hold’em. Kula asked me if I knew how to play.

  I nodded—though I wasn’t sure if my experience betting with nickels and dimes during casual games qualified me to play poker with a bunch of oil workers.

  They were playing the following night, they said. Would I like to come?

  14. TIOGA

  The first time companies drilled for oil in North Dakota was way back in the 1910s, a time when other areas of the country were experiencing oil booms. The United States had become the primary source of oil, producing more than half the world’s oil—and it stayed that way for another 40 years. Geologists suspected that North Dakota could have large reserves, but its unique geology proved to be more difficult to explore than in Texas and Oklahoma. One company, Pioneer Oil & Gas, drilled in the Williston area in 1916, but after four years, it found nothing and abandoned the operation.

  More companies explored the area in the early 1920s after a geologist published a press notice titled “Possible Oil & Gas in North Dakota,” but they too had little success. Most oil was deeper than in the productive areas of Texas, and technology was not advanced enough to reach the reserves below. One well achieved the shocking depth of 10,281 feet (by comparison, early oil wells in Texas were closer to 1,000 feet) in 1938, but still no oil came up. What the company didn’t realize at the time was that it had drilled deep enough—but it was a few thousand feet off. This company wasn’t the only unlucky one in the state. For years, engineers and wildcatters struggled to extract oil and find a producing well in North Dakota, bankrupting companies and their investors, many of whom were swindled into believing they were investing in a “gusher” and would become overnight millionaires. Because of the many dry wells, North Dakota’s oil and gas exploration lagged far behind the rest of the country.

  In 1951, that all changed, and the region had a taste of what oil could do. The first successful well was located in Williams County near Tioga, and 50 miles away from the town of Williston. The well was called Clarence Iverson No. 1, after the farmer who owned the land, and the drilling was led by Dr. Wilson Morrow Laird, the state geologist, for Amerada Petroleum Corporation.

  Drilling began on September 3, 1950, and after initial tests around 10,500 feet, one pint of oil bubbled up. Laird was thrilled, but he asked his workers to place the oil in a jar and hide it out of sight. Laird didn’t want anyone to know he might be onto something. He continued drilling to the lowest possible depth, finally stopping around 11,700 feet, when the high pressure became too dangerous. Due to the harsh winter that year, the well tests took months longer than expected. But on April 4, 1951, on a clear, calm day, with melting drifts of snow surrounding the well site, the first economically producible oil gushed up the well. The crew collected more than 300 barrels in 17 hours. It was a historic moment for North Dakota. “We will not soon forget that hectic day of April 4, 1951,” wrote Charles S. Agey, an assistant geologist on the site at the time, “and electrifying news that North Dakota was now an oil-producing state was spread to the corners of the earth.”

  As the oil began to flow, someone yelled, “Light the flare!” and a worker tossed up a flaming, oil-soaked rag into the air to ignite the gas flare. The well produced one of the largest gas flares anyone had ever seen—some 30 feet high and visible from miles away—it was certainly a unique spectacle for the region. A large crowd quickly gathered. “The glare in the sky had drawn several hundred interested spectators,” wrote Bill Shemorry, the photographer for the Williston Press Graphic, who covered the event that night. “The drilling rig and surrounding area were lighted by a huge gas flare. It was almost as if it were daylight.… The silver derrick was illuminated by the light of the flare and stood out in stark detail against the black night sky.” Life magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and many other national publications covered the news. Laird quickly rose to fame throughout the country for his discovery. Two years later, on the original site, a plaque was placed that read: THIS WILLISTON BASIN DISCOVERY CLARENCE IVERSON NO. 1 OPENED A NEW ERA FOR NORTH DAKOTA AND REAFFIRMED THE CONFIDENCE OF HER PEOPLE IN THE OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE OF THIS GREAT STATE. The location continued to produce oil for 28 years until the old casing collapsed beyond repair.

  North Dakota had rarely been the subject of national news, and the pride was palpable throughout the state. Leon “Tude” Gordon, one of the workers on the site who analyzed the original pint of oil, later created popular oil field bumper stickers, including OIL FIELD TRASH AND PROUD OF IT! and STRIVING TO KEEP AMERICA RED, WHITE AND BLUE WITH GAS AND OIL.

  The 1951 discovery sparked western North Dakota’s first oil boom. Other areas of the state were explored, some with more success than others. The Bakken
layers were discovered in 1953 and were named after farmer Henry Bakken, whose property in Tioga had one of the first wells. Some 150 oil operators and hundreds of laborers traveled to the region, living wherever they could—granaries, sheds, garages—and overcrowding the small towns. “The [newcomers] and their families jammed community services, crowded schools, wore out roads … gas flares lit up the night,” wrote Elwyn Robinson in History of North Dakota. By the fall of 1953, 800 people were living in trailers in Williston. And the small town at the hub of the activity, Tioga, grew 250 percent in three years. Companies began leasing mineral rights from landowners as quickly as they could. Some landowners sold their rights for as little as 62 cents an acre, not knowing the worth of the earth below them. Other farmers were better informed, and a few tracts went for $2,000 an acre. By the end of 1952, nearly two-thirds of the state had been leased. Within 10 years, 2,806 wells were drilled, and North Dakota became the tenth-highest producing state in the United States.

  Oil production continued to increase in the state until 1966. That year marked a steady drop in production when companies failed to discover new oil to replace the natural decline of their current wells. Due to the depth of the oil—many pools lay at 14,000 feet—wells were incredibly expensive to drill, and the state’s remote location increased the cost of transporting the oil.

  Production didn’t pick up again until 1974, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the alliance of mostly Arab oil-producing countries, imposed an oil embargo and significantly increased the price of oil worldwide, making exploration once again profitable in many parts of the country, including North Dakota. The state went through another boom after two productive oil fields—the Charlson-Silurian Pool and the Little Knife Field—and a number of other smaller fields were discovered. In 1981, a new record of 834 wells were drilled, and production peaked three years later at 52.6 million barrels. But this boom was short-lived. Around 1983, overproduction caused a major price drop, with prices plummeting from about $40 a barrel in 1980 to $12 a barrel in 1986. Companies quickly downsized and reduced drilling operations; many went bankrupt or moved out of the state.

  During the 1980s boom, Williston became an oil field hub. The town added thousands of people, and the city bought land and borrowed money to build infrastructure to keep up with the growth. When the bust came, Williston was stuck with a mountain of debt, which at one point consumed 40 percent of the city’s budget. “That boom went bust overnight, and it was really hard on the city,” said Chuck Wilder, who grew up in Williston. “A lot of people went bankrupt and houses were lost. It was kind of dark for a while.” Walmart came to Williston in the early 1990s, and the town began to resemble many other small towns across America—a vacant downtown, few jobs, struggling small businesses, and a declining population.

  * * *

  After North Dakota’s 1980s boom, most people gave up on the state. Despite promising beginnings and two booms, North Dakota wasn’t an oil-producing region like Texas or Wyoming.

  Meanwhile, a process called fracking, the drilling method using a combination of sand, water, and chemicals to break apart rock formations, began to garner attention.

  The fracking process itself wasn’t new. The practice of fracturing rock to extract oil was first tried back in the 1860s by a Pennsylvania driller, Colonel Edward A. L. Roberts, who dropped a torpedo down a well to break apart the rock formation. Not surprisingly, the work was highly dangerous, and workers could be blown to bits if anything went wrong.

  The method had mixed results for extracting oil and gas, and few improvements were made until 1947, when Stanolind Oil and Halliburton, the rising oil field service company that specialized in cementing wells at the time, experimented with fracturing rock to tap into natural gas reserves. The companies used compressed nitrogen to pump chemical-infused foam down the well to break apart the shale rock.

  The method was time-consuming and expensive, however, and was used infrequently until George P. Mitchell, a Texas billionaire, and his company Mitchell Energy & Development spent nearly two decades developing the fracking process to access the natural gas reserves in the North Texas Barnett Shale formation. Mitchell focused on gas because, at the time in the 1980s and 1990s, searching for oil seemed like a losing battle. The Barnett Shale area had been abandoned by large energy companies, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, which were off looking for fossil fuels in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. They were searching for large pockets of oil or gas that they could easily, and relatively cheaply, extract with a vertical drill. But Mitchell persisted, betting everything he had on finding a way to extract natural gas from the tight shale rock for a profit.

  Instead of using expensive foams and gels, Mitchell Energy used “slick water”—thousands of gallons of water mixed with friction-reducing chemicals—and combined it with thousands of pounds of manufactured silicate sand to force the rock to fracture. The method gained recognition in the late 1990s and quickly spread to large natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania. Today, some consider Mitchell’s impact on American history similar to that of Henry Ford or Alexander Graham Bell.

  Not far from Mitchell’s operations, a company called Oryx Energy was experimenting with horizontal drilling in the Texas Austin Chalk area. The method was a variation on diagonal drilling—a drill bit is sent a few thousand feet down, then turns and drills hundreds of feet horizontally, unlocking huge reserves of oil. But when Oryx tried the technology in other, denser rock formations, the results were not nearly as impressive. Horizontal drilling was briefly tested in North Dakota’s Bakken and seemed encouraging—the success rate for wells drilled in certain areas was between 97 and 100 percent. But despite the high chance of finding oil, the wells were expensive to drill, and the oil didn’t flow as easily as other wells, so companies quickly abandoned their efforts. “We didn’t have fracking capabilities,” Oryx’s geologist Kenneth Bowdon told author Gregory Zuckerman in The Frackers. “That was the magic ingredient missing for a technological breakthrough.”

  Many drillers, including Mitchell, determined it was too technically challenging to drill through the dense, deep rock, and gave up on North Dakota. In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated there were only 151 million barrels of oil in the Bakken—or about eight days of oil consumption in the United States. In the late 1990s, however, a Denver geochemist from the USGS studied the Bakken shale and came up with a wildly different number: He thought 413 billion barrels of oil sat in the layers below—nearly 3,000 times the USGS’s estimate—but his research was never peer reviewed, and most people thought his number was completely overblown.

  In 2001, North Dakota’s state geologist, John P. Bluemle, saw potential as well. “A large volume of oil and gas remains trapped within the Bakken Formation across much of northwestern North Dakota,” he wrote. “However, economic volumes of oil or gas cannot be produced using today’s technology.… Perhaps some other new technology will be developed.… If this happens, many wells will be drilled for the oil and gas in the Bakken Formation.”

  Despite Bluemle’s prediction, few people were up for this challenge. It wasn’t until 2004, when Harold Hamm, a rising oil tycoon who came from a poor sharecropper family in rural Oklahoma, decided to test horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking technologies on the largely forgotten formations in North Dakota, that it became clear the technology had the potential to revolutionize the U.S. oil industry.

  Hamm had studied the Bakken area for years and convinced investors to take a chance on him. Hamm’s company, Continental Resources, drilled its first well in North Dakota in March 2004 with a few feet of snow still on the ground. To cut costs, the company used a preexisting well in Divide County that had been abandoned in 1981; instead of drilling from the surface, they only had to extend the well, then drill horizontally before fracking it. The well produced oil, but other wells nearby generated mere trickles. Soon the company experimented with fracking wells in
stages. Workers would seal off sections of the well and send the fracking fluid into a smaller, pressurized area. The technique was expensive—about $8 million per well versus $4 million for a well fracked all at once, but the results were promising and unlocked significantly more oil from the shale layers. In total, the first batch of wells produced just 7,000 barrels of oil a day for the company, less than 1 percent of what ExxonMobil produced daily, but it was enough to keep going. Hamm tried to keep his efforts quiet while his company leased cheap land. Nearly a decade later, Hamm became the twenty-fourth richest man in America, with a net worth of more than $18 billion, and owned more oil under U.S. soil than any other American.

  Another company, EOG Resources, once a division of the infamous Enron, also had begun leasing land in North Dakota’s Mountrail County and on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. EOG drilled its first well in April 2006, and it was a disappointment, producing less than 100 barrels of oil a day. But the next wells were huge successes, with some producing over 5,000 barrels a day. Each well seemed to be better than the last. Other drillers and industry insiders began to pay attention.

  Though companies in the Bakken were extracting more and more oil, they remained quiet about how much oil they were discovering, and the rest of the country barely noticed.

  As far as most Americans were concerned, oil production on U.S. soil had slowed to a trickle. Once a world powerhouse in oil production, by 2005, the United States produced about half what it once did in 1970 and imported a record 60 percent of its oil. The traditional pools of oil that produced so many gushers in the 1950s were drying up, and a large portion of U.S. oil production came from offshore fields along the Gulf Coast.

  Americans had to look hard for any mention of U.S. oil development in the news. The only time “oil” and “U.S.” seemed to appear in the same sentence was when discussing America’s declining oil production or fear-inducing literature about “peak oil”—the idea that worldwide oil production would soon peak and decline rapidly, causing global populations to spiral into depressionlike conditions and starvation. Essentially the message was this: The world faced complete economic and societal collapse if we didn’t find more oil reserves quickly or transition to alternative energy.