North Dakota’s Oil Rush
[/media-credit]It’s a life measured out in 18-hour shifts and washed down with 5-hour Energy Drinks and Red Bull, a job on the rigs in North Dakota‘soil boom: three weeks on, two weeks off, in exchange for $100,000 or more a year and the promise of being set up for life.In an America where 18m are out of work, the chance of finding any job - let alone a well-paid job – exerts an irresistible force that is drawing thousands to North Dakota in a 21st century re-enactment of the Gold Rush.
Only this time, it’s oil. North Dakota now produces more oil than several members of Opec, and many in the industry are predicting America will soon overtake Saudi Arabia and even Russia as the world’s top oil producer.
To do that, however, the oil fields need more workers than the thinly populated state of North Dakota can possibly supply. Scores of people arrive every day looking for a new start, a second chance in lives wrecked by personal troubles and the recession.
“A new guy can come out here and fall off a turnip truck and make $50,000, $60,000 easy as long as he can pass a piss test and tie his boots up,” said Don Beaty, an oil worker from Alaska.
But not everyone is lucky, and the oil rush has brought chaos and big city troubles, like bar fights, prostitution and violent crime, to once placid small towns.
It’s 9am by the time Ben Hitchcock finishes his 18-hour workday, overseeing the blend of sand, water, and chemicals used by a major oil company to blast oil out of the rock. He’s due back on again at 5pm, just enough time to bolt a free buffet breakfast and catch up on some sleep in his small cubicle at the “man camp”, the housing laid on by the oil company.
His crew is near the end of their three-week stint. They are worn down, forgetful, and worried about making mistakes. “The number one killer is falling asleep,” Hitchcock said. “You are up for 20 hours, you have to jump in the semi, rig everything up, and people just fall asleep and then go run off the road.”
Those thoughts weigh on him, he said. So do the separations. He is in his 50s now. His marriage ended. He sees his teenage children in two-week bursts. “It’s hard to have a life with this. It’s hard to find any other kind of life,” he said. “I don’t want to do this forever.”
But there’s reward with the risk. Hitchcock hopes one day to run a brew pub in Colorado. He bought the building, an old church. Now he is working for the equipment and furnishings. He figures he is a year or two away from saving up enough to cash out and live his dream.
There are hundreds of Hitchcocks – at least – in North Dakota’s oil rush. The state is now pumping about 560,000 barrels of oil a day, second only to Texas within the US.
What that means is that small towns that had been settling into slow decay are now bursting with opportunities. Williston, the biggest urban area, produced 14,000 new jobs in the last two years. That’s more than the entire population of the town just a few years ago.
Read the rest at The Guardian
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