By Danny Boyd, Special Correspondent
Five years into the Williston Basin’s historic oil boom, operators and
municipalities find themselves wrestling with infrastructure challenges
many regions would love to face: crude oil transportation constraints
brought on by surging production, and maxed-out municipal services in a
rural region with a rapidly expanding population that is bursting at the
seams.
Across North Dakota, demand is off the charts for
everything from drilling rigs and pumping units to housing and office
space, driven by a blistering pace of activity in the Bakken Shale play.
The number of producing Bakken/Three Forks wells in North Dakota has
expanded by more than 700 percent (from 470 to 3,377) over the past four
years, and daily oil production in the state skyrocketed from 36,000
barrels in January 2008 to 481,000 barrels in January 2012–a nearly
14-fold increase!
With that kind of meteoric growth, one of the
most obvious and pressing needs is transportation capacity to ship the
produced oil to market. To meet the need, major investments are being
made in pipeline systems that could double North Dakota’s daily export
capacity over the next five years, as well as in a rapidly expanding
rail transport system that is expected to have a capacity of 750,000
barrels a day this year, according to Justin Kringstad, director of the
North Dakota Pipeline Authority. MORE
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