Michael Patrick F. Smith would not seem to fit the profile of an oil field worker. He’s an actor, a musician and a playwright who sublet his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment to head out west to Williston, N.D., during the height of the Bakken Oil Boom in 2013. As he admits, “It’s a weird resume for a man applying to work …
When the price of a barrel of oil peaked at $145 amid the 2008 economic meltdown, thousands of unsettled men from all over the country descended on the fracking boomtown of Williston, N.D. Centered atop the estimated 7.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil contained within the Bakken Formation, Williston witnessed over the next six years what writer Michael Patrick F. …
The three North Dakota Public Service Commissioners went to Emmons County last week to hold a public hearing. Emmons County is where the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL, in the vernacular) Co. plans to build a big station to boost the capacity of their still-controversial pipeline hauling oil from North Dakota to out-of-state refineries. The PSC is involved because North Dakota’s …
Last June (2014), North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple called disaster agencies and emergency personnel together for a “tabletop exercise” to practice a response to a possible Bakken oil train derailment, and the subsequent explosions. They estimated there would be more than 60 deaths if such an incident occurred in Bismarck, N.D. (65,000 pop.) or Fargo, N.D. (110,000 pop.). — Prairie …
Here’s an update on the strangest, and most fascinating, story I’ve written in all the years I’ve been writing on this blog. This story appears in the current — January 2019 — issue of Dakota Country magazine, where it reaches a hell of a lot more readers than I have on this blog. But for faithful Prairie Blog readers, welcome …
UPDATE: The U.S. Forest Service will announce today that it has extended the comment period on the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Oil and Gas Leasing on our Little Missouri National Grasslands. The 30-day extension means comments will be accepted on the Draft SEIS, outlined below, until Jan. 16, 2019. Although the announcement comes Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, as …
There are a million acres of public land in western North Dakota called the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, managed by the U.S. Forest Service. A management plan was written in 2001 to guide Forest Service employees, and in 2003, a “Record of Decision for Oil and Gas Leasing” identified lands open for lease and how oil and gas development should be …
Here’s an article I wrote for the December issue of Dakota Country magazine, which should be on the newsstands this week. If you’re not already a subscriber, you should be. Here’s the place to go to sign up. They’ve got a Christmas sale going on right now, and the price is right. A year and a half ago, I wrote …
OK, when technology fails you, sometimes you just have to do things the old fashioned way. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the North Dakota Department of Health’s Environmental Incident database and how difficult it is to track the performance of various oil companies. I haven’t heard back from the governor yet, and being an impatient Norwegian, I …
In the early 1990s, a group of 17 conservation organizations, as diverse as the National Wildlife Federation, the Bismarck-Mandan Bird Club, the North Dakota Wildlife Society and the Fargo-Moorhead Audubon Society, gathered under a symbolic big tent and produced a document outlining the dangers facing the North Dakota Bad Lands and offering a plan to protect some of North Dakota’s …
Ruth Buffalo wrote a perfectly sane, accurate and compelling letter-to-the-editor a few days ago, but the truthfulness was more than the Ward County Red Snouted Port could bear. Sad. I have never met Ruth Buffalo, but I know she is very smart because I can read and comprehend. And educated. She is also quite pretty and has a beautiful family. …
Setting aside protests for a while, let’s look at a planning effort that’s being done right. Here’s an article I wrote for this month’s Dakota Country magazine. Is it too much for North Dakota citizens to expect that they should be provided a reasonable forecast of the environmental effects of 20,000 to 50,000 oil wells on our western landscape? Hmm. …