by Russell Gold
Inside the van, several workers with large headsets sit in gray swivel chairs bolted to the floor. They work at a long desk, with computers and monitors hanging from the ceiling displaying pressures, volumes, pH balances, and a dozen other measurements. There are four large windows in front of them looking out onto the industrial tableau of a large blue blender truck feeding the frack fluid into six giant trailers with silver pumps, all leading to a single four-inch pipe that rises to the top of a twelve-foot stack of red valves. The computers, the headphones, and the focused faces make the van feel a bit like a NASA command center. But rather than clean-cut engineers, the workers are scruffy. There is an assortment of beards and mustaches, and hair spilling out from under baseball caps. The North Dakota oil field has boomed so quickly that certain basic necessities—an appointment with a barber included—are hard to find. If a NASCAR pit crew had been hired to work at NASA, it would look a lot like the folks in the van.
A week ago, red stones covered this five-acre pad. The drilling rig had come and gone, leaving behind a long hole into the ground. Now the Irene Kovaloff must be fracked, or else the oil will remain in the Bakken rock formation.
People have been drilling into the Bakken for decades. A Tulsa company called Stanolind Oil and Gas drilled the first successful well. This was in 1953—and a couple hours’ drive north of the Irene Kovaloff. Stanolind fracked the Woodrow Starr #1 well one time with 4,900 pounds of sand and 120 barrels of crude oil. It produced 536 barrels of high-quality crude a day for four years until problems with the well caused the company to plug it up. Modern Bakken fracks are of a different scale. It’s like comparing a pocket calculator with an eight-digit LCD display to a modern desktop computer. Byington orchestrates a job that used four trucks full of sand and more than one million gallons of water, which sit in sixty blue shipping containers that formed a wall around two sides of the pad.
What has changed in the nearly sixty years between the Woodrow Star and the Irene Kovaloff wells? The obvious answer is that the frack jobs have grown larger, more sophisticated, and more expensive. But there’s another, less obvious, difference. For decades, companies have drilled a handful of wells a year into the Bakken. Some were quite good producers, especially those in parts of the basin where natural fractures and folds allowed oil to accumulate. Adding up all the output, the Bakken produced about one hundred thousand barrels of oil a day. The day the fracking of the Irene Kovaloff finished, the North Dakota Department of Natural Resources reported that oil production had topped seven hundred thousand barrels a day for the first time. Most industry forecasters expect it to exceed a daily output of one million barrels and perhaps reach two million barrels before leveling off. North Dakota, quipped oil economist Phil Verleger, “should start considering applying for membership in OPEC.” At the time, the Roughrider State produced more than OPEC member Ecuador. It passed another member, Qatar, in the summer of 2013. It is fun to imagine North Dakota’s governor, Jack Dalrymple, who grew up on his family’s wheat farm near Fargo, nibbling on chocolate Sacher tortes at OPEC’s Vienna headquarters, discussing oil quotas with ministers from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Angola.
“There are three things that make a good well. Location, location, location,” explained Pat Tschacher, Marathon’s superintendent of well completions in the Bakken, when we met in Marathon’s new Dickinson offices a couple days before the frack job. “The challenge we face is to make a good well in a bad location.” The Irene Kovaloff is in a bad location. The Bakken here resembles a gray sidewalk. Picking up a piece of it, it is inconceivable that there is oil inside, much less that the oil can be extracted. But the industry figured out in the late 2000s how to make good wells in bad locations. That’s what turned the Bakken into a giant oil field, where companies such as Marathon are fracking a few thousand wells a year. At each, the playbook is the same. Assemble a drilling rig and drill a well. Disassemble. Then bring in the frack equipment: “Sand King” trucks carrying four hundred thousand pounds of fine sand, conveyor belts, pipes, pumps, and chemical vats. Frack the well. Move on. Repeat.
At the Irene Kovaloff site, the weather disrupted this assembly-line efficiency. In the days before Josh Byington’s speech, the moveable factory was brought in on dozens of tractor trailers. Machinery was carefully put in place until this patch of open ground resembled a crowded parking lot. Water trailers were backed into place until there was barely enough room to fit an arm in between them. Flatbeds with opaque tubs of chemicals were positioned near a dispensary truck. The giant sand trailers backed up on a conveyor belt that led to a hopper. Walking around the site requires vigilance to avoid tripping over the pipes and data wires jumbled underfoot. As the crew finishes setting up, the winds become gusty. Promotional bumper stickers boast that the industry is “Rockin’ the Bakken.” Now the data van is rocking, buffeted back and forth by the winds. A flagpole attached to the van’s roof blows off its mooring. Moving the final pieces of heavy pipe with a truck-mounted crane is out of the question. On the nearby two-lane highway that connects Killdeer and Dickinson, tumbleweeds the size of German shepherds go marauding past.
After this delay, the wind abates enough to install the final pipes. But as Byington peers out the windows from inside the van a few minutes after the meeting, he sees another problem. “We’ve got a leak on number four,” he says. During a routine prefrack pressure test, a compact mist of water was spraying from one of the six pumper trucks. Sly Henderson, a wiry man with short-cropped hair and a thin mustache riding atop his upper lip, looks out from inside the van and spotted the leak. “Rafael, can you please bleed the line?” he says into his mouthpiece. He issues orders in short, staccato bursts in a quiet, almost polite voice. The six pumper trucks are parked in a row, with only a couple feet between each truck and its neighbor. A blue-clad worker places one foot on the metal wheel guard of two trucks, straddling the open space. He delivers a dozen hard blows with a large hammer to the faulty valve to tighten it.
“Thank you, gentlemen, let’s go ahead and clear the line,” says Henderson. But when the equipment is pressured up to 6,800 pounds per square inch, the leak reappears. Henderson sighs. “Let’s replace the gasket,” he says. He picks up a Styrofoam cup and spits tobacco juice into it.
Waiting for his crew to loosen the valve and install the new gasket, Henderson explains that he ended up in North Dakota after his landscaping business in suburban Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tanked. “The economy went down like this,” he says, waving his hand in a steep dropping motion. Unemployment was rampant, and for the first time in years, keeping his family fed and under a roof became a challenge. He was accustomed to working hard outside. His search for work brought him to Baker Hughes, a large oil-field service company. For two weeks at a stretch, he lives in one of the many man camps that have been built in North Dakota. Cobbled together in a hurry, these sprawling complexes of connected modular buildings can hold seven hundred to one thousand workers each. Each man gets a narrow private room with enough space for a single bed, a desk, and a dresser. A flat-screen television perches above the dresser. Meals are served in a cafeteria.
When Henderson’s two weeks are up, he will head home to his wife and kids in Georgia, where he now lives. Few workers in the Bakken oil field are from North Dakota. The Bakken boom is occurring in one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country. The population of the entire western part of the state could fit in a college football stadium. The largest operator of these man camps will soon house one out of every hundred North Dakotans.
Sly Henderson’s story is typical. “Everyone comes for the money. Everyone comes because they’re out of work,” says Byington. “The guys who make it, who stick around, come from a working background. They’re used to working hard for long hours.” The same could be said for the companies that are drilling wells. Byington grew up on a farm west of here. His uncle raised cattle, grain, and potatoes. When his stint is over, he gets in his pickup truck and drives ten hours west to his wife
and two children in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He is considering moving them to a nearby town in North Dakota, but there are so many new oil-field workers that rents have shot up.
For Byington, the oil field was a career that began when he was nineteen years old. A few days after graduating high school, he went to work for a road paving company in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where his mother had a job. After a couple months, Byington lost the job in a round of layoffs. He put in an application at a car dealership in town and then walked into the local office of an oil-field service company. “By the time I was finished with my application,” he says, “I was hired.” That was twenty years ago, and he has never left the oil fields. He followed oil-field work around the western states and ended up in North Dakota. He has driven trucks and checked water levels. He spent a winter working on top of the giant blender, making sure that the liquid was mixing with the sand, while trying to keep his numbed fingers from hurting too badly. He worked in the chemical van, where the saccharine smells from giant silver boxes of chemicals bothered him. Whenever something broke, Byington wanted to take it apart and fix it so he could understand how it worked. His work ethic earned him promotions.
By the time the Bakken oil field began to boom, he had risen to the top job on a fracking crew. Byington has a calmness about him, even when subordinates get frazzled. On the Irene Kovaloff, one delay followed another. After the gasket on the pumper truck is replaced, a safety valve designed to regulate pressure in the metal pipes doesn’t work. It needs to be swapped out. As time passed and daylight ebbs away, Sly Henderson’s politeness starts mixing with aggravation. When his order to turn on a stand of four halogen lights isn’t met with a quick response, he barks into his headset, “Gerard! Would you please go get the goddamn lights?” After a two-hour delay, the crew is ready to frack. The workers have built a factory on a promontory in an ocean of prairie grass in two or three days. After the job is done, it will be disassembled and moved a few miles to the next job.
“Blender, blender, are you ready?” Henderson calls out into his mouthpiece. “Thank you.”
“Chem ad, ready to roll? Sand guys, is everything in place? Know which one you’re coming out of?” A pause. “Okay. Good.” The sun has set. Outside, the wind knocks a halogen floodlight from its stand, leaving it dangling by its cord twenty feet up in the air. With each gust, the light sways back and forth, and shadows dance around the well.
Henderson absentmindedly fingers the side of his computer monitor, which displays a grid of boxes six across and nine deep. The boxes record different measurements, such as pressure, pH balance, and volume. Each box has its own eye-pounding color combination: green lettering on a brown background, yellow on blue, white on pink, black on orange.
He speaks to the workers in the van. “Okay, everyone in position. Ready to go?” There are murmurs of assent.
A small, heavy black ball, less than an inch in diameter, is taken out of an orange container. It feels surprisingly heavy in the hand, like a piece of a meteor. It is measured with calipers to ensure it was the right size, and then handed to a worker who walks it outside to a set of valves near where the main four-inch steel pipeline angles off the ground and climbs a dozen feet before turning and heading down into the top of the well. The worker holds up the ball and puts it into a large opening. He screws a top onto the opening and then turns a yellow handle. The ball begins a two-minute journey to the bottom of the well, riding on a plume of thick gel. When it arrives near the end of the well, it wedges into a small baffle inside the pipe. The force of the liquid behind the ball slides open a sleeve, sealing off the rest of the well and opening several small holes. The liquid rushes through the holes and hits the Bakken, beginning the process of cracking the oil-rich shale.
Forcing liquid under extraordinary pressure into the Bakken is the raison d’être of this operation. It is why Marathon invested $9 million on the Irene Kovaloff and why men are working through the cold North Dakota night. It is why a twenty-thousand-foot hole has been drilled under the rolling hills covered with sunflower farms and cattle-grazing land. It is why thousands of men, and a few women, have migrated to this corner of the country. There is oil here—oil that will be taken to a refinery on a peninsula north of Seattle and others strung along the Texas Gulf Coast and even on the East Coast. The refineries will heat up the crude in pressurized vessels, and then break up the long strings of hydrogen and carbon molecules into smaller pieces. These pieces have recognizable names (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, propane) and some less familiar names (naphtha) that are octane additives. The crude from the Irene Kovaloff will flow through a labyrinthine industrial system: well to storage tanks to pipelines to crude rail cars to refineries to more pipelines to bulk gasoline distributors to convenience stores to car tanks.
The Irene Kovaloff is a small part of an enormous change in the United States’s relationship with oil. After World War II, inexpensive oil fed an economy that roared. Affordable fuel is why America built the interstate highway system and the suburbs. Travel boomed on the back of gasoline. Route 66 wouldn’t have been built, much less become iconic, if only a few could afford to drive its long stretches. The United States became an enormous consumer of oil, and also one of the world’s largest oil producers. In late 1970 ten million barrels a day came from US wells. And then began a period of long, slow decline. But consumption didn’t slow. It kept increasing. Rising imports made up the difference. Tankers full of crude arrived at the then-new Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, America’s single largest point of entry for crude. Deepwater tankers idled a few miles off the coast and unloaded the cargos into floating buoys connected to pipelines. Within a few years, more than five million barrels a day of OPEC crude was imported into the United States. In 1973 surging fuel costs led to the first “oil shock,” a period when geopolitical disputes cut off supplies and global economic growth was clipped by pricey oil. This pattern of a strong economy leading to high oil prices that, in turn, contributed to recessions repeated in 1979, 2001, and 2008. Expensive foreign oil has long been a brake on the economy. In 1973 President Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, an effort to eliminate dependence on foreign energy by 1980. Project Independence failed. By the end of the decade, imports from overseas had nearly doubled.
“I’ve been in this business forty-three years, and this is the biggest change in my career,” observed Bill Klesse, chairman and chief executive of Valero Energy, the largest refiner in the United States. Reliance on overseas crude is plummeting, he said. Part of the reason is that cars are getting more fuel efficient and using more biofuels. A bigger part of the equation is that America and Canada are generating a lot more crude oil. Sitting in his office in San Antonio, Texas, Klesse explained that he was retooling his refineries to run on crude from Texas and North Dakota and importing less from Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. “If you said three years ago that North America could be oil self-sufficient, it was a joke,” he said. “But now, it’s very real.”
The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based energy watchdog and forecaster funded by the world’s industrialized nations, believes this shift is just beginning. It predicts that by 2020, US oil production will grow to an all-time high of 11.1 million barrels a day. Around that date, America would surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Canadian crude output also grows quickly in the forecast. As that happens, LOOP will have fewer visitors. By 2030, North America could become an oil exporter. Of course, these kinds of predictions are often wrong. But the Irene Kovaloff—and thousands of other wells like it—are at the forefront of a major geopolitical change. For generations, US foreign policy aimed to keep the spigots flowing overseas and the channels of oil delivery unimpeded by foreign potentates. As the ball traveled through the Irene Kovaloff well, speeding its way to the Bakken, all of these foreign entanglements seem less pressing.
The hydraulic heart of fracking is the liquid pumped into the well. Almost all of it is water: snowmelt from the uppe
r Rockies that flows into the Missouri River and into the giant Lake Sakakawea Reservoir. From there, local distribution companies pump it about the state, and oil companies buy it by the millions of gallons. By the time these companies inject it into the well, it doesn’t look like river water. It looks like gelatinous glop. In the Bakken and elsewhere, companies transform the water into a highly engineered viscous liquid designed to carry sand deep into the new fractures. As it heats up underground, the gel reverts to a watery state. This change allows the sand to drop out and remain in the fractures, holding them open like pillars in a coal mine. The water flows back out.
Bobby Kinsey, a fluid technician at the Irene Kovaloff, oversees this alchemic transformation. He works in a cramped lab van that looks like a mobile high school chemistry classroom. An open plastic tub of potato salad and a Dr Pepper sit near his computer. To test the frack liquid, Kinsey pours a few ounces of water into a kitchen blender attached to a large plate-sized dial that controls the speed of the blades. He turns the dial, and the water begins to churn. He picks up two small syringes with liquefied guar—a bean grown in India and used extensively by McDonald’s to thicken its shakes—mixed with diesel fuel. In 2012 demand for guar rose and, coupled with a dry growing season in India, created a temporary shortage. Dave Lesar, chief executive of Halliburton, a global oil-field services company based in Houston, promised his customers that there would be no disruptions, however, because the company had created a “strategic guar reserve.” Halliburton and others are developing a synthetic guar alternative so that the rainy season in India never threatens fracking again.
