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| Image source: UND EERC |
The Dynamo Team went out to Williston, ND last month to see firsthand
the shale revolution that is changing
the energy world. The reason to come to Williston is that it is
at the center of the action. Landing in Williston was uneventful, save that the
airport was probably the size of our incubator, Greentown Labs.
A boomtown is an amazing place, where at first the world
seems like any other you are familiar with, but after a while you realize it is
actually different. Very, very
different.
Getting out of the Airport, Williston seems like any other
midwest American town of ~14,000 people: streetlights, cars, gas stations, and local
restaurants that were never displaced by big national chains. But once you drive half a mile beyond the
airport, you notice the odd things.
There are far too many trucks on the road. Not SUVs, but 18 wheelers, and cement trucks,
and tankers—in fact, you barely see any other types of vehicles on the
road. These trucks always seemed to be
on the road, morning or evening; we would later hear them screaming by as we
tried to sleep in our hotel.
As you drive from the airport, along Highway 2, you see the
roads are lined, not with strip malls like you would see in suburban America,
but office buildings of service companies; names like Schlumberger, Baker
Hughes, Cameron, Caterpillar, & Weatherford streak by in your peripheral
vision. Of the houses you did see, you
wonder why the houses are so small and packed together in this mostly
un-inhabited county. You notice the
flash of light from the sides of metal buildings still under construction, and
you wonder why there needs to be so many trailer parks for this little
town. As you will later learn, Williston
has the highest rent in the US, and some believe that the population of
Williston swells to 75,000 people in the summer—and they are all here to work
on drilling oil.
We arrived at our hotel to find it was still under
construction. Workers were painting the
walls and lining Ethernet as we checked in.
When we asked the front desk where we could grab some dinner, she
exclaimed “Applebee’s just opened up down the street.” As we drove to dinner (we opted for something
more local than Applebee’s) we saw Pumpjacks right in town—an integral part of
the urban landscape.
We had arrived in a boomtown, where oil wells and buildings,
services were being built out at a lightning pace, but where talent and the
houses for them to live in could not be found fast enough. We had arrived in a town where at every table
sat groups of people with the word oil on their lips. We had arrived in a town where something new
and different was taking place; where people came to be a part of the tidal wave
that would bend history.
