All is not rosy here in this Boomtown, the Truth about Williston from people who deal with it.

(North Dakota ranks last on a recent nationwide survey of worker safety, with 12.4 fatalities per 100,000 workers in 2011, versus a national average of 3.5.)

 The first symptom was a rash on Jacki Schilke’s nose. It appeared late in the winter of 2009 and was soon followed by a flood of other health problems afflicting Schilke, her husband, their dog, and many of the animals on their 160-acre ranch near Williston, North Dakota -- a tiny town in the state’s northwest corner that has become the epicenter of the recent Great Plains oil and gas boom. Winters are long and cold here, and animals die from time to time; that’s just a fact of life on the dry, hilly prairie. Long hours in the fields, together with a second job, can wear a body down. Schilke’s face shows it in hard lines and weathered skin. At 53, she’s short and sturdy, with a ponytail of straw-colored hair. She says she’s always been healthy. But since that winter, her body, along with everything and everyone around her, seems to have deteriorated. Schilke lost 25 pounds in the summer of 2009 and started having trouble breathing. She had constant diarrhea and would get lightheaded. Her husband Steve’s asthma worsened, frequently leaving him tired and short of breath. The couple began getting unusual muscle aches. The following winter, Jacki got another rash, a quarter-sized spot on her leg that wouldn’t go away. She visited a neurologist who couldn’t explain what was happening. She noticed an ammonia-like smell in the house and started looking for a source, thinking that might be what was making them sick. "Hell, I hauled shit out of here by truckloads," Jacki says. "I threw everything away. There wasn’t even a bottle of cleaner left in this house." In June 2010, the couple’s Yorkie, Blue, got bloody diarrhea and started coughing up mucus. They had to put him to sleep a few days later. Soon after, the water from a well they used for their animals started bubbling, "like 7UP." Then the creek behind the house started bubbling, too, with a frothy film forming on the water’s surface and white residue appearing on the creek bank. The Schilkes started hauling water in from town. In August, Jacki was out feeding her bull one morning when she lost strength and fell to her knees. From that spot, she could see a giant drilling rig across the property line, a few thousand feet from her house. "It just kind of clicked," she says. While the Schilkes and their animals were suffering from one ailment after another, oil companies were establishing new wells ever closer to their home. At the beginning of 2009, Brigham Oil and Gas began putting in a series of wells about nine miles south, along the route that Jacki often took to Williston, where she managed a bar until she became too sick. That summer Brigham drilled a well six miles to the west of the Schilkes’s ranch, and another one six miles to the south. In January 2010, Oasis Petroleum began drilling the first of two wells a couple of miles to the east. Finally, Oasis put in two wells right on the edge of the Schilkes’s property. There are now dozens of wells in the area, including four within a mile of their home, each sporting gas flares billowing smoke into the sky.

Oil extracted from wells ringing Williston, North Dakota, helped push the state’s surplus to a record $1.6 billion and generate the nation’s lowest jobless rate. Drilling also left the city broke. While the U.S. Census counts about 16,000 residents, Williston says it provides services to more than 38,000, including workers living in temporary camps, hotels, and even vehicles. Keeping up with the load is spurring budget gaps that will deplete rainy-day funds, according to Standard & Poor’s, which cut city debt to BBB+ in December, three steps above junk. The $5.8 million of debt the city sold in December for water and sewer work is a fraction of the $625 million officials say they need for roads, the airport, water supplies and other facilities to handle the Bakken oil boom. The issue, which is exempt from state taxes, included debt due in May 2019 priced to yield 1.5 percent, about 0.75 percentage point above benchmark municipal securities, data compiled by Bloomberg show.“Williston is the epicenter of this and it’s been, to some extent, destroyed,” said state Representative Robert Skarphol, whose district encompasses part of the city. The Republican has sponsored a bill that would return more oil revenue to Williston.

WILLISTON, N.D. (AP) — An oil well near the town of Tioga, North Dakota continued to leak oil, gas and fracking fluid on Monday, days after authorities learned about the problem, a local official said.

The well is owned by Denver-based Emerald Oil.


Williams County emergency coordinator Mike Hallesy said he was notified Friday evening of the spill in the western North Dakota's oil patch and that the leak hadn't stopped. The Department of Mineral Resources said the incident occurred at the Ron Burgundy 3-23-14H well, around eight miles northwest of Tioga. Hallesy said that the site's wellhead failed during hydraulic fracturing, the process of a pressurized mix of water, sand and chemicals into a well to fracture rocks and promote the flow of oil and gas.

Alison Ritter, a public information officer with the Department of Mineral Resources, said the well is protected by a confidentiality agreement. As a result, she said, her office could disclose only the name of the well, its general location, its owner and that a spill had occurred. Information about confidential wells is withheld from the public for up to six months.

Life in a fracking boomtown: man-camps, meth labs, strippers, and the gas gold rush In a country with an unofficial underemployment rate of 20%, the tiny railroad whistle-stop of Williston, North Dakota near the Montana border (population 17,000 and spiking) is currently at capacity: There’s not a motel room to be had in the city, housing prices are double what they were a year ago ($300,000 for a two-bedroom home), and the daily onslaught of new arrivals is reduced to living in their cars, RVs, sporadic tent cities or the rapidly proliferating “man camps” – clusters of trailers in an open field that pack in oil patch workers dormitory style, sometimes six to a room. Access to running water and simple sanitation is so rare that public businesses have had to lock their bathrooms to discourage makeshift sponge baths or the dumping of wastewater

The co-op has decided to sell 20 percent of its water to frackers to help keep prices low and pay back state loans. That has not gone down well with the Independent Water Providers, a loose confederation of ranchers, farmers and small businesses that for years has supplied fracking water. Since opening in January, the co-op has tried to limit the power of the confederation with an aggressive legal and lobbying strategy. The Independent Water Providers have fought back, arguing that the co-op shouldn't be selling fracking water at all. The state Legislature stepped in with a law last month designed to quell the tension and nurture competition, but industry observers expect the acrimony to continue."When all of us had nothing (before the oil boom), there was nothing to fight about," said Dan Kalil, a longtime commissioner in Williams County, home to many oil and natural gas wells. "Now, so many friendships have been destroyed because of water and oil."

By Patrick J. Kiger

For National Geographic

Published November 11, 2013

It's well known that water has been key to the shale oil and gas rush in the United States. But in one center of the hydraulic fracturing boom—North Dakota—authorities are finding that the initial blast of water to frack the wells is only the beginning.

The wells being drilled into the prairie to tap into the Bakken shale need "maintenance water"—lots of it—to keep the oil flowing.

So while the water first pumped down the hole to crack rock formations and release the underground oil and natural gas typically totals 2 million gallons (7.5 million liters) per well, each of North Dakota's wells is daily drinking down an average of more than 600 gallons (2,300 liters) in maintenance water, according to recent calculations by North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources (DMR).

Over the life of the well, which authorities presume will be 30 to 40 years, maintenance water needs could add up to 6.6 million to 8.8 million gallons (25 to 33.3 million liters)—or more than three to four times the water required for the initial fracking.

North Dakota DMR Director Lynn Helms addressed the maintenance water issue in a taped address earlier this fall at the annual meeting of the North Dakota Association of Oil and Gas Producing Counties.  "What we're beginning to realize is that these . . . wells will need freshwater for maintenance over their life," Helms was quoted as saying in a report on the presentation in the local newspaper, the Dickinson Press. The implications for water demand are significant in a state that gets less than 13 inches of rainfall each year in its driest areas, and ranks among the bottom 10 states for precipitation. In 2012, the Bakken oil industry used about 5.5 billion gallons (209 billion liters) of water—more than the amount used by the 110,000 inhabitants of Fargo, the state's biggest city. When the Bakken is fully developed in the next 10 to 20 years, the oil and gas play's 40,000 to 45,000 wells may need to consume roughly double that amount—as much as 10.2 billion gallons per year (28 million gallons each day)-in maintenance water to keep the oil flowing, according to a July 2013 DMR presentation to the North Dakota legislature.   The implications for water demand are significant in a state that gets less than 13 inches of rainfall each year in its driest areas, and ranks among the bottom 10 states for precipitation. In 2012, the Bakken oil industry used about 5.5 billion gallons (209 billion liters) of water—more than the amount used by the 110,000 inhabitants of Fargo, the state's biggest city. When the Bakken is fully developed in the next 10 to 20 years, the oil and gas play's 40,000 to 45,000 wells may need to consume roughly double that amount—as much as 10.2 billion gallons per year (28 million gallons each day)-in maintenance water to keep the oil flowing, according to a July 2013 DMR presentation to the North Dakota legislature.

In sparsely populated rural areas, the addition of even relatively few jobs can have a big impact, they say. But the first thing to watch is that industry and media reports tend to overestimate the number of jobs that will come with shale oil and gas development:

an industry funded study authored by Considine et al. (2011) suggests that shale natural gas extraction was associated with 140,000 Pennsylvania jobs during 2010. A similar study by Kleinhenz & Associates (2011) predicted that the natural gas industry would create and support 200,000 jobs in Ohio by 2015, though drilling did not begin in earnest until 2012. These estimates, though large, pale in comparison to a recent study that finds California’s Monterey shale play could create up to 2.8 million jobs by 2020 (USC Global Energy Network, 2013; Vekshin and Nash, 2013). These predictions seem unrealistically high, especially when compared to what has actually happened in booming areas like North Dakota’s Bakken. That region added only 49,000 jobs from 2003 to 2012, and not all of that growth was necessarily related to energy development. That actual growth is a fraction of the growth projected in the industry-backed studies for Pennsylvania, Ohio and California.

Many impact studies also fail to account for possible offsetting negative effects from energy development that may offset the positive effects such as any crowding out of other economic activity that would have occurred otherwise (e.g., entrepreneurs outside of energy may try other locations with more stable labor markets). Higher prices (especially for housing) may also offset some of the benefits of higher wages potentially negatively affecting quality of life in the area. In addition, many of the benefits may trickle away to other areas due to commuting workers, purchases outside the region, and absentee landowners receiving the lease payments. Finally, perceived or real environmental degradation may frighten some current residents and potential residents away— especially in the long-run. The take-away is that communities should be wary of industry funded economic impact studies (regardless of the industry) and should try to verify economic impact estimates with independent experts.

Williston, North Dakota, for example, experienced an energy boom in the 1970s and early ’80s when oil prices peaked. But the boom was followed by a bust.

[After the bust,] Williston’s economy subsequently greatly lagged the U.S. up until the most recent shale boom. Williston (Williams County) did not surpass its 1981 peak in employment until 2010. Generally, poor long-term economic performance is common in extractive resource based economies. This natural resource curse has been documented at every level of geography from countries, to U.S. states and counties. Some reasons for this include weak or corrupt governance, lack of economic diversity, a weak climate for innovation and entrepreneurship in the broader economy, and a reduced human capital development.

Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller's formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses.

But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region's land and into its waterways with increasing regularity.

Hydraulic fracturing — the controversial process behind the spread of natural gas drilling — is enabling oil companies to reach previously inaccessible reserves in North Dakota, triggering a turnaround not only in the state's fortunes, but also in domestic energy production. North Dakota now ranks second behind only Texas in oil output nationwide.

The downside is waste — lots of it. Companies produce millions of gallons of salty, chemical-infused wastewater, known as brine, as part of drilling and fracking each well. Drillers are supposed to inject this material thousands of feet underground into disposal wells, but some of it isn't making it that far.

According to data obtained by ProPublica, oil companies in North Dakota reported more than 1,000 accidental releases of oil, drilling wastewater or other fluids in 2011, about as many as in the previous two years combined. Many more illicit releases went unreported, state regulators acknowledge, when companies dumped truckloads of toxic fluid along the road or drained waste pits illegally.

State officials say most of the releases are small. But in several cases, spills turned out to be far larger than initially thought, totaling millions of gallons. Releases of brine, which is often laced with carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals, have wiped out aquatic life in streams and wetlands and sterilized farmland. The effects on land can last for years, or even decades.

Kris Roberts, who responds to spills for the Health Department, which protects state waters, agreed, but acknowledged that the state does not have the manpower to prevent or respond to illegal dumping.

The number of spill reports, which generally come from the oil companies themselves, nearly doubled from 2010 to 2011. Energy companies report their spills to the Department of Mineral Resources, which shares them with the Health Department. The two agencies work together to investigate incidents. In December, a stack of reports a quarter-inch thick piled up on Kris Roberts' desk. He received 34 new cases in the first week of that month alone. "Is it a big issue?" he said. "Yes, it is."

NEW TOWN, N.D. (AP) — Leaders of North Dakota's Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations say that while they are thankful for the money that oil has brought the once-impoverished Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, they are concerned about the environmental impact of drilling on their land.The Three Affiliated Tribes opened their third annual oil and gas conference Tuesday at the 4 Bears Casino in New Town, on the northwestern North Dakota reservation. One of the first speakers to take the stage, stationed next to a banner proclaiming "sovereignty by the barrel," was Mervin Packineau, a tribal councilman."Our economy is really looking good," he said. "But now it's time to turn around and start protecting our land, guys."

In February, the reservation's oil production accounted for more than a quarter of the state's daily total, according to the state's Department of Mineral Resources. Tribal officials say that would put the reservation among the top ten oil producers in the nation.

But the sentiments of some tribe members are far removed from the, "Drill, baby, drill," mantra printed on T-shirts for sale at gas station convenience stores elsewhere in the oil patch. It reflects what they say is a strong, personal connection to the land and their long history in a place where most residents didn't arrive until the start of the oil boom, about five years ago.

Recent oil spills and incidents involving the illegal dumping of oil production byproducts have highlighted the environmental risks associated with drilling.

I'm not anti-oil. ... I'm anti-irresponsible," he said.