The drilling rigs puncture the horizons and tuck into the valleys of the bald North Dakota landscape. Their steel towers have taken root on a tableau of badlands and treeless plains that extends for more than 100 kilometres.
They are like steeples in the French countryside, erected in ever greater numbers, more every month, by an industry whose only deity is oil. Near many are the flares, the votive candles of the hydrocarbon age, where natural gas not worth enough to save is burned in enormous fireballs, some the size of small cars, so brilliant they blind drivers at night.
Cutting through it all are the roads – paved, gravel, red rock – that carry the rumbling parade of trucks, some burdened with supplies for the rigs, others with the oil they have prodded from the earth.
This is the place the energy companies call the Bakken, an oil play that has erupted across a forgotten corner of the U.S. It is a frenzy of drilling and pumping and moneymaking. It is also a place where a new energy future is emerging, one that holds the promise of ending U.S. dependence on overseas oil and kick-starting the country’s stagnant economy. Government estimates suggest it could yield 4.3 billion barrels of oil. One industry estimate is five times higher, which would mean the Bakken alone could hold as much recoverable oil as the rest of the country. And it’s just the beginning.
The flares lit in the Bakken, a so-called “tight oil” play enabled by a revolution in drilling technology, are spreading rapidly across the continent. Suddenly, geologists and drillers are discovering that what works in the Bakken works in a lot of other places, too, bringing forth sudden new volumes of oil – and optimism that there will be much more – in Texas, in Utah, in Ohio, in Saskatchewan and in Alberta. In all, 14 places are being explored for tight oil.
All those drills turning in all those places have sweeping ramifications for North America.
The Bakken and its followers have fundamentally altered the energy outlook for the continent. If energy consultant IHS CERA is right, in the span of merely one decade, tight oil wells will pump more oil than the entire oil sands. The growth is so globally significant that the firm has reduced its 2020 world oil price estimate down from $120 to $100 (U.S.) a barrel. And it’s begun contemplating possibilities that would have been considered insane only a few years ago.
Tight oil also stands to have a substantial economic impact. The enormous cost of drilling tens of thousands of wells – which can run $10-million (U.S.) each, not including the cost of acquiring land – will pour hundreds of billions into domestic wages and manufacturing. The fact that Americans will be buying U.S. gas at the pumps will also have a meaningful impact on the dollars the country sends abroad every year.
“There might be some possibility that we could ... pretty much reduce our oil imports to zero,” said Leta Smith, director of oil and gas supply outlooks with IHS CERA. “That’s a really optimistic case. And that’s not what we’re forecasting right now. But still, it’s an interesting question to postulate.”
The sun that shines on the Bakken, it seems, is shining on America itself.
But clouding the outlook is a substantial degree of uncertainty. For one, the entire Bakken play is so new that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict how much oil will ultimately come from a well. Bakken wells are volcanoes: they briefly shoot out a tremendous quantity of oil, then quickly slow. A well that produces 1,000 barrels a day in the first 30 days – they start anywhere from 300 to more than 1,000 – is unlikely to produce much more than 150 barrels a day 12 months later.
