The Boom (7 page)

Before workers transform the Irene Kovaloff into a producing oil well, they must make sure everything is secure and ready. When the prefrack safety meeting ends, a class system among the workers becomes visible. Most of the men head in one direction, where they check water levels in the rows of blue trailers, stand amid clouds of silica dust to make sure the sand doesn’t fall off the conveyor belt, or tend to the dozens of machines. They spend their shift smelling musty diesel and tie their hoodies around their faces to keep out the cold. It is in the high thirties, but the constant wind makes it feel significantly colder. A smaller group heads in another direction and climbs a few steps into a temperature-controlled trailer called the data van. They spend their shift inside, peering out of thick-paned windows at the well, giving orders through headsets. They take off their hard hats and strip down to T-shirts under their coveralls. There is a coffee urn at their disposal. A car stereo bolted into a wall panel keeps them entertained during overnight shifts. On a recent night, Pink Floyd’s
The Dark Side of the Moon
accompanied a frack. The next night it was Ted Nugent. The guys outside hope to work their way into a data van job.

Byington heads inside. He is at the top of the pyramid, and the only person not wearing coveralls. He is the “company man,” the oil company’s top representative on a job site. But Marathon Oil contracts out this work, and even though Byington is Marathon’s man on the frack site, he works for StimTech, a company in Rock Springs, Wyoming, that provides a variety of skilled workers and well services to the industry. His job title is consultant. Marathon has invested $9 million to lease the location as well as drill and frack the Irene Kovaloff. The company usually has one employee at the frack site, responsible for health and safety. This arrangement is the modern corporate approach to oil production. The company subcontracts out nearly everything and leaves almost nothing to discretion. For this well, engineers in Houston created a “prog,” a forty-page document that provides step-by-step directions. Workers will frack the well thirty times. Each frack has six distinct steps. It’s all in the prog: when to switch chemical recipes, when to release four different gradients of sand, how much pressure to use. All of these instructions were uploaded into data van computers. “Marathon cooks this up, kicks it up to us, and we try to execute it to a tee,” says Byington.

Inside the van, several workers with large headsets sit in gray swivel chairs bolted to the floor. They work at a long desk, with computers and monitors hanging from the ceiling displaying pressures, volumes, pH balances, and a dozen other measurements. There are four large windows in front of them looking out onto the industrial tableau of a large blue blender truck feeding the frack fluid into six giant trailers with silver pumps, all leading to a single four-inch pipe that rises to the top of a twelve-foot stack of red valves. The computers, the headphones, and the focused faces make the van feel a bit like a NASA command center. But rather than clean-cut engineers, the workers are scruffy. There is an assortment of beards and mustaches, and hair spilling out from under baseball caps. The North Dakota oil field has boomed so quickly that certain basic necessities—an appointment with a barber included—are hard to find. If a NASCAR pit crew had been hired to work at NASA, it would look a lot like the folks in the van.

A week ago, red stones covered this five-acre pad. The drilling rig had come and gone, leaving behind a long hole into the ground. Now the Irene Kovaloff must be fracked, or else the oil will remain in the Bakken rock formation.

People have been drilling into the Bakken for decades. A Tulsa company called Stanolind Oil and Gas drilled the first successful well. This was in 1953—and a couple hours’ drive north of the Irene Kovaloff. Stanolind fracked the Woodrow Starr #1 well one time with 4,900 pounds of sand and 120 barrels of crude oil. It produced 536 barrels of high-quality crude a day for four years until problems with the well caused the company to plug it up. Modern Bakken fracks are of a different scale. It’s like comparing a pocket calculator with an eight-digit LCD display to a modern desktop computer. Byington orchestrates a job that used four trucks full of sand and more than one million gallons of water, which sit in sixty blue shipping containers that formed a wall around two sides of the pad.

What has changed in the nearly sixty years between the Woodrow Star and the Irene Kovaloff wells? The obvious answer is that the frack jobs have grown larger, more sophisticated, and more expensive. But there’s another, less obvious, difference. For decades, companies have drilled a handful of wells a year into the Bakken. Some were quite good producers, especially those in parts of the basin where natural fractures and folds allowed oil to accumulate. Adding up all the output, the Bakken produced about one hundred thousand barrels of oil a day. The day the fracking of the Irene Kovaloff finished, the North Dakota Department of Natural Resources reported that oil production had topped seven hundred thousand barrels a day for the first time. Most industry forecasters expect it to exceed a daily output of one million barrels and perhaps reach two million barrels before leveling off. North Dakota, quipped oil economist Phil Verleger, “should start considering applying for membership in OPEC.” At the time, the Roughrider State produced more than OPEC member Ecuador. It passed another member, Qatar, in the summer of 2013. It is fun to imagine North Dakota’s governor, Jack Dalrymple, who grew up on his family’s wheat farm near Fargo, nibbling on chocolate Sacher tortes at OPEC’s Vienna headquarters, discussing oil quotas with ministers from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Angola.

“There are three things that make a good well. Location, location, location,” explained Pat Tschacher, Marathon’s superintendent of well completions in the Bakken, when we met in Marathon’s new Dickinson offices a couple days before the frack job. “The challenge we face is to make a good well in a bad location.” The Irene Kovaloff is in a bad location. The Bakken here resembles a gray sidewalk. Picking up a piece of it, it is inconceivable that there is oil inside, much less that the oil can be extracted. But the industry figured out in the late 2000s how to make good wells in bad locations. That’s what turned the Bakken into a giant oil field, where companies such as Marathon are fracking a few thousand wells a year. At each, the playbook is the same. Assemble a drilling rig and drill a well. Disassemble. Then bring in the frack equipment: “Sand King” trucks carrying four hundred thousand pounds of fine sand, conveyor belts, pipes, pumps, and chemical vats. Frack the well. Move on. Repeat.

At the Irene Kovaloff site, the weather disrupted this assembly-line efficiency. In the days before Josh Byington’s speech, the moveable factory was brought in on dozens of tractor trailers. Machinery was carefully put in place until this patch of open ground resembled a crowded parking lot. Water trailers were backed into place until there was barely enough room to fit an arm in between them. Flatbeds with opaque tubs of chemicals were positioned near a dispensary truck. The giant sand trailers backed up on a conveyor belt that led to a hopper. Walking around the site requires vigilance to avoid tripping over the pipes and data wires jumbled underfoot. As the crew finishes setting up, the winds become gusty. Promotional bumper stickers boast that the industry is “Rockin’ the Bakken.” Now the data van is rocking, buffeted back and forth by the winds. A flagpole attached to the van’s roof blows off its mooring. Moving the final pieces of heavy pipe with a truck-mounted crane is out of the question. On the nearby two-lane highway that connects Killdeer and Dickinson, tumbleweeds the size of German shepherds go marauding past.

After this delay, the wind abates enough to install the final pipes. But as Byington peers out the windows from inside the van a few minutes after the meeting, he sees another problem. “We’ve got a leak on number four,” he says. During a routine prefrack pressure test, a compact mist of water was spraying from one of the six pumper trucks. Sly Henderson, a wiry man with short-cropped hair and a thin mustache riding atop his upper lip, looks out from inside the van and spotted the leak. “Rafael, can you please bleed the line?” he says into his mouthpiece. He issues orders in short, staccato bursts in a quiet, almost polite voice. The six pumper trucks are parked in a row, with only a couple feet between each truck and its neighbor. A blue-clad worker places one foot on the metal wheel guard of two trucks, straddling the open space. He delivers a dozen hard blows with a large hammer to the faulty valve to tighten it.

“Thank you, gentlemen, let’s go ahead and clear the line,” says Henderson. But when the equipment is pressured up to 6,800 pounds per square inch, the leak reappears. Henderson sighs. “Let’s replace the gasket,” he says. He picks up a Styrofoam cup and spits tobacco juice into it.

Waiting for his crew to loosen the valve and install the new gasket, Henderson explains that he ended up in North Dakota after his landscaping business in suburban Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tanked. “The economy went down like
this
,” he says, waving his hand in a steep dropping motion. Unemployment was rampant, and for the first time in years, keeping his family fed and under a roof became a challenge. He was accustomed to working hard outside. His search for work brought him to Baker Hughes, a large oil-field service company. For two weeks at a stretch, he lives in one of the many man camps that have been built in North Dakota. Cobbled together in a hurry, these sprawling complexes of connected modular buildings can hold seven hundred to one thousand workers each. Each man gets a narrow private room with enough space for a single bed, a desk, and a dresser. A flat-screen television perches above the dresser. Meals are served in a cafeteria.

When Henderson’s two weeks are up, he will head home to his wife and kids in Georgia, where he now lives. Few workers in the Bakken oil field are from North Dakota. The Bakken boom is occurring in one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country. The population of the entire western part of the state could fit in a college football stadium. The largest operator of these man camps will soon house one out of every hundred North Dakotans.

Sly Henderson’s story is typical. “Everyone comes for the money. Everyone comes because they’re out of work,” says Byington. “The guys who make it, who stick around, come from a working background. They’re used to working hard for long hours.” The same could be said for the companies that are drilling wells. Byington grew up on a farm west of here. His uncle raised cattle, grain, and potatoes. When his stint is over, he gets in his pickup truck and drives ten hours west to his wife and two children in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He is considering moving them to a nearby town in North Dakota, but there are so many new oil-field workers that rents have shot up.

For Byington, the oil field was a career that began when he was nineteen years old. A few days after graduating high school, he went to work for a road paving company in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where his mother had a job. After a couple months, Byington lost the job in a round of layoffs. He put in an application at a car dealership in town and then walked into the local office of an oil-field service company. “By the time I was finished with my application,” he says, “I was hired.” That was twenty years ago, and he has never left the oil fields. He followed oil-field work around the western states and ended up in North Dakota. He has driven trucks and checked water levels. He spent a winter working on top of the giant blender, making sure that the liquid was mixing with the sand, while trying to keep his numbed fingers from hurting too badly. He worked in the chemical van, where the saccharine smells from giant silver boxes of chemicals bothered him. Whenever something broke, Byington wanted to take it apart and fix it so he could understand how it worked. His work ethic earned him promotions.

By the time the Bakken oil field began to boom, he had risen to the top job on a fracking crew. Byington has a calmness about him, even when subordinates get frazzled. On the Irene Kovaloff, one delay followed another. After the gasket on the pumper truck is replaced, a safety valve designed to regulate pressure in the metal pipes doesn’t work. It needs to be swapped out. As time passed and daylight ebbs away, Sly Henderson’s politeness starts mixing with aggravation. When his order to turn on a stand of four halogen lights isn’t met with a quick response, he barks into his headset, “Gerard! Would you please go get the goddamn lights?” After a two-hour delay, the crew is ready to frack. The workers have built a factory on a promontory in an ocean of prairie grass in two or three days. After the job is done, it will be disassembled and moved a few miles to the next job.