Here in North Dakota, 800,000 barrels a day of oil are being pumped from our own roots. It’s being sent all around the world to supply the oil needs of the people. Many people around the United States and even us North Dakotans have no clue the vastness of oil drilling in our state and to know what’s going on in your state is good knowledge to have. A few times a year I travel to the western side of the state to the town of Williston where my grandparents live and everywhere you look there are oil drills, oil workers, and oil related companies. Two of my uncles are in the oil business in which they manufacture drill bits used for the drilling process. They have taught me a lot and being around the area you learn even more from the town’s people. Today I am going to inform you about the oil itself and the oil process in North Dakota. There are many ways in which the oil boom is affecting North Dakota and some points I’ll examine is the drilling that’s taking place in our own state, as well as the affects it has on North Dakota and lastly its future.
The not so small town of Williston was once a sleepy farm town until oil companies discovered ways to tap the vast Bakken formation believed to hold as many as twenty-four billion barrels of oil. Oil was first discovered within the Bakken in 1951 and it consists of 200,000 square miles of the subsurface of the Williston Basin. The oil lies underground in a shale rock formation, known as the Bakken, stretching across western North Dakota, northeast Montana, and into Canada’s Saskatchewan Province. The Bakken formation accounts for 91% of North Dakota’s oil and in 1961 was when the oil drilling in this area started occurring. Originally they started drilling by conventional vertical wells and as time went on they advanced to more efficient ways including horizontal wells and finally ending with hydraulic fracturing that is being used today.
It hasn’t just been in the past ten years that oil drilling has been going...