Bakken Boomtown ?  

Well - the USGS report is out and the estimate for recoverable oil in the Bakken is pretty modest compared to some of the massively inflated estimates floating around the lunar right media lately - 3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil. This is still a respectable number - more than 1 month of global oil consumption at the current rate (which gives you an idea of how hard it is to have a serious impact on the peak date, and how much that 220 billion barrels of "undiscovered" oil under Iraq is worth).

On a related note, Energy Bulletin has an article from Zach Dundas on the oil boom in Montana and North Dakota (MonDak) - Boomtown.

What happens when an oil field as big as any in the Middle East is discovered in the desolate border towns of Montana and North Dakota?

The story started out in a Montana newspaper, then grew into a minor legend: An unnamed rancher out in the state’s far east, a sparsely populated town along the North Dakota border, received his first royalty check for crude oil pumped out of his pastureland. Oil is the big news in this area, which the locals call MonDak; on both sides of the border, new wells can mean life-changing money for the families who own some of the toughest, driest farm and ranch land in the country.

So the story goes that the farmer opened the envelope and looked at the check, the first quarterly installment. He read the amount, read it a second time, then he sent the check back. He must have thought the damn fools had put the decimal point in the wrong place—$1.1 million, an unfathomable fortune, just couldn’t be right.

The tale circulated this fall in and around Sidney, a town of 5,000 people that anchors a huge swath of eastern Montana’s gold and slate-gray hills. Sidney is not part of the Montana where movie stars buy trophy ranches: temperatures swing from minus 40 degrees in the winter to 110 in the summer, and no one would confuse recreation with the battle to squeeze a living out of the land.

The town also happens to sit at the epicenter of the biggest inland oil discovery in the United States in 50 years. Two miles below the surface lies a stratum of oil known as the Bakken formation, holding an epic haul of crude—some surveys suggest up to 200 billion barrels, a near-Saudi-sized reserve. And since the end of 2000, when new drilling technology and rising prices combined to unleash the find, Montana and North Dakota have become the underground rock stars of American oil, among the few states recording production increases. With oil prices soaring above $100 a barrel, it’s like giant vaults of cash opened beneath the MonDak soil.

In late November, despite cutting winds and near-horizontal snow, Sidney and its hinterlands are a hive of activity. Oil-tanker trucks patrol the narrow highways and gravel farm roads day and night. The cafés, casinos, and bars are full of guys wearing coveralls emblazoned with oil-company logos, most prominently those of “Team” Halliburton and that notorious company’s rival Schlumberger, the outfit BusinessWeek calls “the stealth oil giant.” Ubiquitous “help wanted” signs testify to the most open job market anyone around here can remember—if you can work, you’re working in oil. A genuine boom is in full swing.

This has all happened relatively quietly, perhaps because MonDak is so remote. But locals will tell you that the Bakken formation has torn the area’s social fabric in a big way. Oil spawns more jobs than the thin population can fill, paying wages higher than local businesses can afford to pay their employees. Landowners collect royalties on oil pumped out of their property, rearranging the economic fundamentals of a place where, traditionally, nothing comes easy. It has also created subtle tensions between those making big oil bucks and those not profiting from the boom. ...