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Thursday, January 5, 2012 ■ Covering the Williston Basin ■ Volume 2, Issue 1 Our Bakken neighbor


Montana communities share effects of region’s ‘Klondike fever’ for oil


By JAN FALSTAD Lee News Service


off around Kalispell, Brenda and Vance Birkey,


moved 550 miles away to Sidney to work in the Bakken fi eld, perhaps the biggest oil fi nd in modern U.S. history. Screwing plywood skirts around their


SIDNEY, Mont. — When logging fell natives of western Montana,


small trailer to prepare for snow and 40-below temperatures, the Birkeys, like thousands of others, traded in the com- forts of their home for a fresh start in this region’s Klondike fever for oil. When western Montana’s recession


100-car tanker trains. “The Bakken work is huge. It’s mas- It’s extraordinary,” said division


sive.


general manager Hal Fuglevand. More


destroyed his livelihood, Birkey said he traded in the mountains and his chain saw for the steering wheel of a scraper. “We came for the jobs. Now we’re out


here where the buffalo roam. It’s differ- ent,” he said. Richland County surrounding Sid-


ney sported Montana’s second-lowest jobless rate in October, 2.8 percent. That compares with 14.6 percent in Big Horn and 14.4 percent in Sanders counties, the state’s highest rates. The vortex of real and wished-for


riches from the oil patch is sucking in workers and products and services and gushing the boom money out across Montana. Knife River’s Yellowstone Division is


grading and hauling gravel to a railroad loading facility being built north of Fair- view where crude oil will be loaded into


50 Billings busi- nesses are chasing the estimated $1.5 billion a month being spent drill- ing oil wells in the Bakken, strad- dling the Mon- tana-North Da- kota border. There are more than 200 rigs, and each one can drill a well a month at an aver- age cost of $7 mil- lion per well. Montana’s Bak-


than Our Bakken neighbors


JAMES WOODCOCK/Lee News Service


ABOVE: Oil rig workers change pipe on a Bakken rig as they start drilling the horizontal leg at a Continental Resources on a drilling site between Sidney, Mont., and Culbertson, Mont. LEFT: Paterson driller Fred Crowe oversees a pipe change-out on the Continental Resources’ “Jane” oil rig, which is drilling into the Bakken between Sidney, Mont., and Culbertson, Mont.


ken produces roughly $1.2 billion worth of oil per year. A steady stream of trucks haul food,


gravel, scoria, sand, natural gas, crude oil, pipe, asphalt, concrete, fresh water and liquid nitrogen to keep the rigs drill- ing and the wells pumping. The Bakken business has jumped


president Mike Wilson said. In 2010, The Sage Corp. of Billings set up a special team to train more oilfi eld drivers, including for Canadian-based


Oil boosts businesses


Businesses in Billings are busy fi lling oil company needs — 4-5


recently opened a Billings offi ce. In just three years, the Bakken has


Sanjel Corp., which


eight-fold in two years at Billings’ White- wood Transport Inc. “And we haven’t even tried. It’s crazy,”


tripled sales at Aspen Air US Corp. of Billings, which hauls liquefi ed nitrogen. Sales at RDO Equipment Co., which sells heavy equipment, are up one-third in two years. “Thank God it’s going on because


there’s not much work going on in the rest of Montana,” Knife River’s Fugl- evand said. In 2010, Big Sky Economic Develop-


ment offi cially started marketing Billings as an energy hub and is setting up “speed


Iran threatens


closing oil passage US says interference of oil vessels will not be tolerated — 10


dating” events to connect oil executives with local businesses. Executive director Steve Arveschoug


natural gas,” he said. The fi rst unit-train hauling crude to Louisiana left Dickinson, on Nov. 9. Within a 35-mile circle around Ba-


inville, oil companies are investing $500 million to $1 billion to build two oil loading facilities and a natural gas load- ing plant, according to Bainville Mayor Dennis Portra.


NE gives map of


areas to avoid TransCanada now has an offi cial map of sensitive areas to avoid — 13


said he tries to envision this large-scale development fi ve to 10 years from now. “It’s not just the Bakken, it’s coal and


Continued on page 7


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