North Dakota's Oil Boom is a Blessing and a Curse

The state's oil boom is bringing unmatched growth and unanticipated problems.

Dan Kalil still remembers a nightmare he had once as a child. In it, he envisioned looking out over his family’s North Dakota farm and seeing it swarmed with strangers, bustling with unknown activity that filled the farm with a strange light. Kalil says the dream has stuck with him in the decades since. The eerie thing is that it came true.
Kalil, who chairs the Williams County Board of Commissioners in northwest North Dakota, about 60 miles south of the Canadian border, is a third-generation farmer. The land where he now grows peas, lentils and grains -- including barley used by Anheuser-Busch, one of his largest customers -- was homesteaded in 1906 by his grandfather who, like many of the area’s settlers, emigrated to rural North Dakota from Lebanon. Kalil considers the land “sacred ground,” part of the old farmer ethos that regards land as so revered that it shouldn’t even be used as collateral for a loan.
Then, two years ago, a crew of 14 people literally set up camp on Kalil’s farmland and began drilling an oil well that remains here to this day. It’s one of two wells on his land -- another will be built this summer -- and they could continue to pump for upwards of 30 years. As Kalil surveys his 8,000 acres, parts of which are littered with the unassembled pieces of an oil pipeline, he laments what’s happened to it. “It’s like my worst nightmare come true,” Kalil says. “We’ve been invaded.”
Kalil’s situation sounds outlandish, but it’s typical in many parts of North Dakota, where the owner of the land doesn’t necessarily own the mineral rights to the oil underground. Rights of mineral owners trump those of landowners. Kalil couldn’t stop the wells from going on his land, and although each well earned him a one-time compensation of $10,000 to $15,000 from an oil company, he says he’d be happier without the money and the wells. “We had such a magic place,” he says. “We are seeing the wholesale industrialization of western North Dakota.” Cont. Reading

For more photos, please visit the slideshow North Dakota's Ghosts.