North Dakota county feels Bakken boom ebb away as oil falls
(Reuters) – Just over a decade ago, this sleepy farming community on the fringe of North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation hosted the state’s first horizontal oil well to be hydraulically fractured, or fracked, helping set in motion an economic revolution that shook the world.
Today, Divide County may be another vanguard for the state, this time ominous, as the first to feel the full effect of a collapse in prices that has lopped more than 50 percent off the price of oil since the summer.
Only five oil rigs were drilling in Divide County this week, down from 12 last August, according to state data. While those only account for a handful of the more than 162 rigs still drilling in North Dakota, the drop has been much steeper than elsewhere in the state and could signal trouble across the No. 2 U.S. oil producer behind Texas if prices continue to slide.
A “Coming Soon” sign still marks the spot on a patch of fallow farmland just outside of Crosby, the county seat, where a 200-person “man camp” to house oil workers was set to be built. Late last fall, Timberline Construction Group, an Alabama-based contractor, put the project on hold after an oil company pulled out of a housing contract.
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