In the rolling, muted prairies that surround the town of Williston, North Dakota, the signs of decline are impossible to miss. Cranes, dozers and all manner of heavy machinery sit idle. Massive oil rigs stand all but abandoned, looming over the landscape like towering memorials to a bygone age. In town, businesses that sprang up from the dirt overnight struggle to stay open in the face of an economy in peril. In such troubled times, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Williston was America’s next great boom town just a few short years ago.
The Bakken Goes Boom
It began in the early days of April 1951, when an exploratory well in a remote wheat field northeast of town became the first in the region to draw oil. Within a month, North Dakota experienced its first taste of oil frenzy. Nearly the entire state – a staggering 30 million of its 44 million total acres – was put up for sale or lease, and enterprising oil companies were quick to swoop in and stake a claim. Though the oil was difficult to access and initial progress was slow, the dawn of the new millennium brought hydraulic fracturing techniques that finally put the extraordinary stores of oil within reach.
The result was an extraordinary boom that transformed the community from a sleepy little country town into a bustling, booming oil city at the heart of one of the largest and most productive oilfields in the country. The population tripled within a few years as thousands of people flocked to the area seeking their piece of the action. New houses, apartments and hotels were erected to handle the sudden influx of fortune-seekers. Money poured into the local economy, further fueling the explosion of new construction. Even as cracks began to show and oil prices slipped from their historic highs, the unprecedented growth continued virtually unabated.
What Goes Up Must Come Down
What started as a minor downturn in late 2014 quickly snowballed in the first months of the following year, as a market flooded with oil – including the more than 1.2 million barrels the state produced each day – responded with sharply tumbling prices. At its nadir, oil prices bottomed out at 70 percent below its lofty peak little more than a year earlier. As oil companies reached and even dipped below their break-even point due to the expensive techniques needed to tap the Bakken’s tremendous oil reserves, new development ceased. Existing oil production faltered and contracted slowly at first, eventually withering until just over two dozen active drilling rigs remained, down from a peak of 218 in 2012.
The resulting shockwaves reverberated throughout the local economy. Layoffs came in waves, leaving throngs of oil workers, truck drivers and machine operators to confront the difficult choice between packing up and moving or trying to ride out the bust. Thousands chose to leave, and along with them went much of the demand for housing that had sparked the building boom. Tax revenues plummeted, costing the city more than $1.5 million in lost revenue in the span of a year. The Salvation Army quickly found itself inundated with people who’d lost their jobs and even their homes, in some cases within a matter of days. With few options and an uncertain future, often the best the organization could do was offer a bus ticket out of town.
Hope Ahead?
Despite the hard times and the promise of more uncertainty in the future, many in North Dakota’s most prominent boomtown-gone-bust remain hopeful. For all that the city has lost, a vast fortune in oil still remains below the prairies that spill out toward the horizon like an amber ocean. “Now Hiring” signs are slowly beginning to reappear, and a recent job fair brought more than 50 employers hoping to fill at least 300 open positions. Prominent oil companies have yet to pull up their roots, and some estimate that the area could thrive – inevitable booms and busts notwithstanding – for at least half a century on the deep reserves of oil contained within the Bakken oilfields.
If anything, many local officials and business leaders insist that the recent rough patch has been less an oil bust than a case of the little prairie town simply growing too quickly for its own good. The jobs and the workers will inevitably come back, as they always do, and so too will the money. Oil prices will recover as the market adjusts, and the town will be better positioned to handle the next boom period that is almost certain to come. Already, there are some signs of life. The count of active drilling sites in the area has gone up slightly, and some oil companies have begun to call back some of the workers they’d laid off during the worst of the downturn. Oil prices are not yet high enough to make the oilfields competitive with those in places like Texas and Oklahoma, but they’re no longer at rock bottom.
Williston has undergone as much change as perhaps any city in the country over the past decade, and residents and civic leaders know that more change is ahead. Many are keenly aware that the central and western United States is littered with boomtowns gone bust, where the jobs and the money dried up as quickly as it came and simply never returned. But as long as there is oil, there will be those who seek to make their fortunes. And as long as there is oil, there is still hope.
