How long will bakken boom last

The decrease in the Bakken unemployment rate following was sharper than other areas. After increasing with the decline in drilling from to , unemployment resumed its downward trajectory prior to the COVID pandemic. Construction activity for commercial buildings and residential units began rising sharply in the city of Williston in Stark County, which includes the city of Dickinson, posted rapid gains in housing units authorized in Stark County housing units authorized comprised 18 percent of all North Dakota units authorized in For perspective, Stark County has about 4 percent of the state population.

Deposit growth at Bakken area banks was particularly strong during and picked up again in Commercial and development loans at Bakken area banks increased faster than those at other banks in Montana and North Dakota since The incidence of serious mortgage problems in the Bakken paralleled mortgage problems in the rest of Montana and North Dakota relatively closely until , when it dropped sharply compared with more modest declines elsewhere.

Unlike other data in the Banking section, these data are not restricted to mortgages made or held by Bakken-based banks. Video: fedgazette Senior Writer Phil Davies talks about jobs in the oil patch. Home Region and Community. Explore a range of economic, demographic and financial data for the Bakken, and learn about factors driving jobs and other forms of development in the oil patch of North Dakota and Montana.

Location of the Bakken in the Ninth District. Oil Production Labor Markets. Loading State Oil Production chart Summary North Dakota is the third largest oil-producing state in the country behind New Mexico and Texas. Loading Active oil drilling rigs and oil price chart This will make it harder for the state to hang on to its current production levels of around 1.

The state is expecting output to decline in November and December because of a lack of well completions. Magazine October Free Trial Subscribe. Lynn Helms. In , the U. This oil was technically recoverable due to the recent success with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing fracking of oil and gas-rich shale, which allowed hydrocarbons trapped in the rock to be pumped out of reservoirs previously unreachable by conventional oil drilling technology.

The industry celebrated the discovery of oil in the middle of North America but realized it also posed a problem. North Dakota is a long way from most U. Its shale definitely held oil and gas, but the area was not prepared to deal with these hydrocarbons once they came out of the ground. Most of the supporting infrastructure was never built — or was built haphazardly — resulting in risks to the public that include industry spills, air and water pollution, and dangerous trains carrying volatile oil out of the Bakken and through their communities.

With industry insiders recently commenting that the Bakken region is likely past peak oil production, that infrastructure probably never will be built. Embed from Getty Images. Meanwhile, the petro-friendly government of North Dakota has failed to regulate the industry when money was plentiful during the boom, leaving the state with a financial and environmental mess and no way to fund its cleanup during the bust.

After the USGS announced the discovery of oil in the Bakken, the oil and gas industry moved fast, with both the industry and state and federal regulators ignoring whether what amounted to essentially new methods of extracting and transporting large amounts of oil called for new rules and protections.

The industry could have restricted production until new pipelines and processing equipment were built but instead moved to rail as the next transportation option. High oil prices motivated drillers to get the oil out of the ground and to customers as fast as possible. Moving oil by rail was essentially unregulated and would not require the permits, large investment, or lead times required for pipelines, leading to the Bakken oil-by-rail boom.

Moving large amounts of this light volatile oil on trains had never been done before — but there was no new regulatory oversight of the process. The industry waved away these warnings. Regulators have still failed to address the known risks for oil trains in the U.

Fracking for oil also resulted in large volumes of natural gas coming out of the same wells as the oil, further contributing to the financial troubles of shale producers. However, with no infrastructure in place to process or carry away that gas, the industry chose to either leave it mixed in with the oil loaded onto trains making it more volatile and dangerous or simply burn flare or release vent the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

In July, The New York Times detailed the environmental devastation caused by flaring in the oil fields of Iraq, where they flare about half of the gas as opposed to the quarter of the gas that North Dakota has flared.

Also in July, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California published research that found pregnant women exposed to high levels of flaring at oil and gas production sites in Texas have 50 percent higher odds of premature birth when compared to mothers with no exposure to flaring.

Flare from an oil well in the Permian region of Texas. Another major blindspot for the industry and regulators has been the radioactive waste produced during fracking.

When the industry did finally acknowledge this issue in North Dakota, its first move was to try to relax regulations to make it easier to dump radioactive waste in landfills — a practice that is contaminating communities across the country.

The fracking boom in North Dakota has resulted in widespread environmental damage and is worsening the climate crisis, given its high flaring levels, methane emissions, and, of course, production of oil and gas. As major Bakken producers go bankrupt and continue to lose money while the oil field goes bust, who will pay to clean up the mess? Like most oil-producing states, North Dakota had the opportunity to require oil and gas producers to put up money in the form of bonding which would be designated to properly clean up and cap oil and gas wells once they were finished producing.

The Bakken boom made a lot of money for a select few oil and gas executives and Wall Street financiers. But as the boom fades, taxpayers and nearby residents have to deal with the financial and environmental damage the industry will leave behind.

As DeSmog reporting has revealed, shale producers have not been profitable for the past decade, even though they have drilled and fracked most of the best available shale oil deposits.