The Oil Boom brings Prosperity – and What Else?
It’s hard to find a place or person in North Dakota that hasn’t been touched and changed by the oil boom.
Some of the changes have been good.
- The State collects literally billions of dollars in oil revenues each year.
- Unemployment is almost zero – and in some areas there’s a labour shortage.
- There’s an oil-funded sovereign wealth fund of almost $3 billion.
- Oil money has funded universities, museums, hospitals and other charitable causes.
- Oil money is the largest source of funds to politicians.
Employment
Jobs abound – and not just directly in oil extraction. The money is good, and you don’t always need qualifications.
Shelf stackers at Walmart earn almost $20 / hour – more than double Walmart’s national average.
Strippers can earn up to $2,500 / £1,500 per shift on a good night.
Oil Wildcatters can earn a six-figure salary while living in a “man camp”
The American Dream
People say it’s a tough life but that you can live the American Dream.
Others don’t agree.
A mother of two got a well-paying job at a bar as an exotic dancer. “I do this work back in Illinois” she says. “But the men here are 100% worse, it’s horrible. They’re animals”.
She’s leaving, after living in Williston for just one week. There are plenty of others – some from as far away as Russia – who are willing to take her place.
- Rents have skyrocketed as the population surged thanks to the oil boom.
- Fatal road collisions, drug abuse and assaults have seen a dramatic increase.
- Domestic violence is rife – and the housing shortage means victims often have to remain with their abusers.
Women rarely feel safe. The male : female ratio is estimated to be about 10 : 1.
A 25-year-old barista carries a stun gun wherever she goes – she gets hit on even though she’s heavily pregnant and happily engaged. “I don’t make eye contact with anybody” she says.
Billowing clouds of dust are kicked up by an endless stream of trucks pounding on deteriorating roads.
Towns never sleep – it can be rush hour at 11pm on a Sunday or 7am on a Tuesday.
Residents report radioactive waste left to degrade in vacant buildings, and hate the skyrocketing crime rates and housing costs.
“They Do What They Want”
The oil industry, thanks to its donations and thus political clout, operates mostly with impunity.
Drillers wastefully burn off nearly a third of the natural gas that’s produced with the oil without paying royalties or taxes. It’s cheaper for them to burn it than to install pipelines and processing plants to capture it.
Residents say they don’t go outside when a rig is flaring – it as noisy as a jet engine and the soot fallout is significant. You’re never far from a fracking rig in North Dakota. Night-time aerial footage shows North Dakota alive with light – it’s all the gas flares.
The quality of life does not seem to be good.
Yet many are in favour of even more oil extraction to further expand the oil boom. Landowners have leased their land to the oil companies and get handsome royalties in return. There are no moves to ban fracking in North Dakota, unlike several other states.
In 2009 there were 451 oil spills in North Dakota – that’s a lot. But thanks to the oil boom, there were at least 1,782 in 2013.
Only a tiny few are punished – authorities issued just 15 fines last year.
Suggestions that the oil companies should clean up their act or have restrictions placed on them (such as a distance between a fracking well and a house, or preventing certain land from being fracked) are met with open hostility.
Don Morrison, executive director of the Dakota Resource Council, noted that if anyone dared to suggest a restriction for an oil company, “he was immediately branded as a radical and weirdo, and not a legitimate part of the conversation.”
Some new regulations have been introduced, but mostly they’ve been suggested by the oil industry themselves.
Measuring air and water quality is met with distrust, and few can be found who are willing to do so.
It’s not like it used to be
Some towns in the prairie state were battling to survive before the oil boom. Teachers were being laid off and people were leaving to find work elsewhere. Now there is a vibrant economy, there are jobs and money. Oil is responsible for that.
Imagine what would happen if all that investment were put into renewables instead? Wouldn’t that be great?
But here’s the rub. You can’t own the wind and the sun, so the huge profits from oil and gas just aren’t there. That means you wouldn’t have the huge salaries and royalties.
Renewables just aren’t as apparently enticing as an oil boom.
But renewables don’t cause climate change.
Renewables don’t wreck the planet, the water we drink or the air we breathe.
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Next: Residents hate this little-known side effect of the oil boom What it’s really like to have fracking near you Want to find out what life is really like for the residents of North Dakota? Watch this great video here.
