TIOGA, North Dakota—Jon Person grew up on the ranch where his family for a century raised livestock and grew corn along White Earth River’s meanders and oxbows while harvesting fields of wheat and oats knitted into the undulating prairie.
White Earth was once a bustling Dakota Territory outpost at the literal end of the line, he said, the terminus of a Northern Pacific rail spur with nothing beyond it but a sprawl of sky and space stretching to Saskatchewan.
Two presidents, including a young Teddy Roosevelt, stayed here when the town had a hotel, but all that was a long time ago, said Mr. Person, 48. Trains still roll through White Earth, he said, but they don’t stop there anymore.
White Earth has a population of 94. From its huddle of homes and a town hall framed by gray cottonwoods dripping with melting snow on a bright December day, Mr. Person drives a few minutes south.
Here, atop a windswept razorback ridge on the folded prairie above the Missouri River, a stone monument marks the spot where Amerada Petroleum Corp. in April 1951 found pay dirt 11,000 feet below Clarence Iverson’s farm, drilling North Dakota’s first commercial oil well.
“I never expected to work in the oilfield,” Mr. Person said.
Like his forefathers, his life was to be tied to the agri-commercial rhythms of the seasons, of grange associations and granary co-ops, of raising a family to run the ranch as it had been run by generations and for generations to come.
But what happened on Clarence Iverson’s farm changed everything, although it would take more than half a century to manifest in the boom that would irrevocably alter lives and landscapes.
When advances in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, opened vast reservoirs of previously inaccessible shale oil to commercial extraction in the Bakken Play, it induced an eight-year rush starting in 2006 with more than 50,000 workers flooding to a dozen western North Dakota counties.
It overwhelmed tiny prairie towns “with both good and bad,” Mr. Person said.
It was good enough for him to join the rush, bad enough for him to never want to see another.
Before the boom, “You could go from my house to Tioga” seven miles west on State Highway 2 “and not see another car. There were no lights,” he recalled. “You knew everybody.”
He was ranching and working the Stanley grain elevator in 2006 when neighbors began finding highly-paid work with oilfield service companies as machinists, mechanics, fabricators, technicians, hustlers, and bustlers, forming or joining new local companies delivering everything from mud pulse telemetry, to “frack trees,” to hot meals to rig sites and mancamps.
“A couple of friends kept pushing me to give the oilfield a shot,” Mr. Person said, urging him to make some fast money and get in on the black gold bonanza while it lasted.
He signed on with Neset Consulting Services, co-founded by Kathy Neset, an Ivy School geologist who was a substitute teacher at Tioga High School when he was a student there.
Nearly 20 years later, that “shot” to make some fast money while it lasted has, as they say in the oil patch, “matured with the play” into a lucrative career that promises to remain so for the foreseeable future.
“I’ve been at Neset Consulting Services since my oldest daughter was 1 year old. She’s 18 now,” said Mr. Person, a father of six and still a rancher.
As Neset’s geological field coordinator, Mr. Person has helped nurture the company’s growth from “a small room in a small house” to a 300-employee operation providing rig sites with lease operators, field medics, roustabout crews, mud-loggers, geologists, gate guards, gas equipment techs, saltwater operators, and safety hands.
Sweet Spot Between Boom and Bust
Independents such as Neset in Tioga, SandPro in Berthold, and Minot-based Creedence Energy Services—the latter two among a wave of post-pandemic start-ups founded by 30-somethings—have carved a stable, lucrative niche in servicing and maintaining well platforms and supplying rigs with manpower, security, and technical services.Except there’s one problem with North Dakota’s drive to create a home-based oilfield service and support workforce: finding workers.
Most of the 15,000 working directly on the 31 rigs drilling new wells in North Dakota on Dec. 22, 2023, were derrick transients, traveling from far and wide to work weeks, sometimes months, of consecutive 12-hour days, living in mancamps, before heading home for two or more weeks at a time, constantly rotating in and out.
Meanwhile, most of the 35,000 high-wage jobs supporting the drilling rigs and maintaining the 19,000 wells generating 1.25 million barrels of oil a day in December were filled by North Dakotans, including native plainsmen such as Mr. Person, and entrepreneurial newcomers such as SandPro Vice President and co-founder Joshua Blackaby, an Air Force veteran from Ohio whose 2019 startup emerged from the pandemic with less than 20 employees and plans to expand to 150 by summer 2024.
Yet, as of December, the North Dakota Job Service reported that at least 3,000 oilfield-related jobs were open with some local companies offering lodging in hotel rooms and apartment complexes as inducements to draw workers, a shortage that will become more acute in spring and summer.
“The national companies can rotate people here or bring them here from somewhere else in the country, but local companies, they have to find people that they’re going to be able to retain,” North Dakota Petroleum Council President Ron Ness said.
“They can’t afford to have a high turnover rate. It’s a challenge retaining workers here. This is hard work.”
Casey Gardner, a “born and raised” native of Williston, the small city that was the epicenter of the 2006-14 boom, said, “There is opportunity here for different types of jobs, for whatever you’re looking for.
“If you want to come up here just to work your whole month, make as much money as you can, and take two weeks off and fly home, that job is here,” said the 33-year-old account coordinator at Creedence Energy Services’ Williston office.
“If you are looking for a job that’s more five days a week, get your weekends off, make a home here,” he continued, “there’s plenty of opportunities out here for that, too.”
What North Dakota’s oil industry offers, he said, are good-paying jobs in growing communities where 20- and 30-something-year-olds can buy homes and raise families in new subdivisions with toys on lawns patrolled by kids on bikes.
“If you’re looking for a fresh start without the hustle and bustle, the opportunities to start over, to start fresh here now are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, 12 years ago,” Mr. Gardner said.
“Companies aren’t necessarily looking for anyone who has a pulse now,” he continued. “They’re actually looking for people willing to work, wanting to settle down, start a life here instead of just getting people who are from California, who come up here work for four weeks and they go back home for two weeks.
“They’re looking for people who are willing to stay here and relocate here.”
It’s a shame they can’t find them, Mr. Ness said.
“The biggest problem facing [North Dakota’s oil industry] is retaining workers, you know, just keeping people in,” he said. “That’s not a unique problem—a lot of industries seem to have that problem—but everything is kind of settled here and there’s lots of success stories here.”
He noted North Dakota’s quality of life and opportunities for commerce and industry.
“That’s a story we like to tell,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), a 1998 graduate of Dickinson High School who recalls having to—and being able to—stand in the middle of highways to get cellphone reception before the boom.
Mr. Armstrong, who faces only a write-in independent in his November 2024 bid for a fourth term as North Dakota’s lone congressional representative, said that when he grew up in North Dakota, “There was no opportunity.”
‘Definitely Eye-Changing’
Mr. Gardner was in high school in Williston during the boom’s onset. “All of a sudden, there’s new people coming in and there’s a bunch of tents popping up in the local park in the middle of town. It was definitely eye-changing. For sure, man.”He attended North Dakota’s Valley City State University and returned to Williston five years later with degrees in health and physical education—and a wife.
“Every time you came back, there’s a new building and there’s a new building and there’s a new building, so it was always a little different,” Mr. Gardner said.
Williston has transcended its boom-town image and, like the “maturing” Bakken Play, has evolved into a bustling small city of young families, said the father of two children.
“It’s different growing up for a kid now than it was when I was a kid here,” Mr. Gardner said. “There’s more stuff to do, a lot more activities for kids. We didn’t have soccer when I was a kid here but now there’s soccer, there’s sports all-year-round for kids to play.”
Mike Wilber, a “mud-logger” who works with Mr. Person at Neset monitoring effluent dredged from two miles below a Hess rig for analysis by on-site and remote geologists, is a North Dakota native.
He lives in New Town on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, although he is not a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, the Three Affiliated Tribes headquartered there.
“I’m just [a] lost Norwegian,” said the 44-year-old father of four daughters. “Before the oil, there wasn’t a lot of wealthy people here. People weren’t well-off. And now, there’s many, many people whose life has changed, has improved about 1,000-percent because of it.”
Even before the boom, Mr. Armstrong said, what made North Dakota distinctive was that “it is rural but not desolate. There’s always a small town nearby with a gas station, a bar, and a church.”
The state has retained that feel in its post-boom, post-pandemic evolution and there are good jobs to be had and room to “grow a life,” he said.
“It’s been fun to watch,” Mr. Armstrong said. “There are a lot of people not from North Dakota who are now from North Dakota.”
