By Tim McDonnell | grist
At 7:00 a.m. local time this morning, Lonnie’s Roadhouse Cafe in Williston, N.D., was already bustling, packed to the gills with truckers and roughnecks tanking up on coffee and omelets for another day in that town’s ongoing fracking boom.
“It’s continuous, it doesn’t stop,” says manager Lonnie Iverson. “Busy, busy, busy.”
It’s become a typical scene here in the last several years, as new drilling technology has unleashed massive deposits of oil from the Bakken Shale, in the process slashing unemployment to the lowest anywhere in the nation, minting a new class of oil wealth, and generally upending what was once a backwater prairie town — turmoil Climate Desk witnessed firsthand last year (see video below). And it looks like that growth is here for the long haul: A new analysis out yesterday from the U.S. Geological Survey doubled previous estimates of how much oil is in reserve under North Dakota, up to 7.4 billion barrels, which would make it the largest oil field in the country.
“It’s good,” Lonnie says. “It’ll keep our people working.” And eating, presumably.
Related:
New Mexico county is first in the nation to ban all drilling and fracking
