Fracking Boom and the Development of America’s Energy Resources
Travis Wright’s first impressions of Williston, North Dakota, in January 2012 remain vivid. It was bitter cold and the Walmart parking lot was filled to overflowing with campers and RVs whose owners were using them as de facto homes while working in the oil fields. Once inside Walmart, Travis discovered pallets of goods blocking the aisles as the understaffed nighttime crew of stockers simply couldn’t keep up with demand. He quickly learned to do his shopping in the middle of the night when the lines were only 30 minutes long. He learned later that this Walmart in Williston was the highest-grossing one in North America. The local economy was booming to such an extent that even paying $17 an hour for entry-level jobs, store officials couldn’t find enough employees to work for that amount.
Travis — at 6′6″ and 280 pounds, his friends called him Big 'Un — was also astonished to learn how expensive it was to live in Williston. A one-bedroom apartment went for $2,000 a month while a singlewide mobile home was $2,400 a month and a 2,000-square-foot home rented for $4,500 a month. So many job seekers had flooded into Williston to land high-paying jobs that the cost of housing had skyrocketed — at least until additional housing could be built to accommodate the dramatic influx.
Travis also remembered how bitter cold it was. In January, the average high in Williston is 22 degrees and the average low is zero, with a median of just 11 degrees. The pace of business was beyond frantic: It was frenetic. In the previous two years, the population of Williston had increased by almost 50 percent from 14,700 to more than 20,000. The city issued a record 610 building permits in 2010, but was on pace to exceed 1,600 within two years. The town’s tax revenues had jumped from less than $50 million in 2010 to more than $80 million three years later. The U.S. Census had just announced that Williston was the fastest growing “micropolitan” area (those with 10,000 to 50,000 residents) in the country.
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