North Dakota – Page 6

Fulfilling a favor: Paralyzed Keene man takes last mountain lion of season in N.D. with help of his friends

From left to right, Beau Wisness, Dusty Hausauer, Chase Wisness, Rusty Christophersen, Chaston Lee and Hailey Schaper pose with the mountain lion that Chase Wisness, who is paralyzed from the waist down, killed on Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. It was the last mountain lion allowed to be hunted in western North Dakota this year. Special to the Forum

It was late July 2008 when Levi Wisness asked his friend, Rusty Christophersen, to do him a favor.

Levi wanted Christophersen to help his younger brother, Chase, hunt a mountain lion in the North Dakota Badlands.

“He goes, ‘Do you ever think we could get Chase in on one?’” Christophersen recalled on Wednesday. “I said yeah, I’ll do everything I could do to get him one.”

Levi Wisness died a week later in his sleep from complications related to a brain tumor he’d been battling for nearly a year.

At the time,17-year-old Chase’s future was uncertain.

He had been paralyzed from the waist down, the result of an auto accident in June 2007 — just months before his brother was diagnosed with the tumor.

“It was pretty cool he thought of me then and it was cool that Rusty was serious when he said we could do it,” Chase said on Saturday.

Over the past month, Christophersen did everything he could to fulfill the favor.

Last Monday, he and about a dozen friends capped off more than three weeks of tracking, scouting and hunting to help Chase, 24, of Keene, hunt and kill a 100-pound female mountain lion near Grassy Butte.

It was the last mountain lion allowed to be hunted this year in the state Game and Fish Department’s western North Dakota zone.

“It finally worked out,” Christophersen said.

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Becker calls for big budget cuts

One of North Dakota’s two Republicans seeking the nomination for governor said Saturday in Dickinson that the state’s next leader will be faced with cutting $1.5 billion in appropriations spending out of its general fund.

State Rep. Rick Becker speaks to a crowd at the Astoria Hotel and Event Center in Dickinson on Saturday.

State Rep. Rick Becker pointed to declining oil revenues and low, stagnant agriculture commodity prices for what he feels is a massive spending cut looming in the 2017 legislative session.

“We find ourselves in a situation where the status quo of what we’ve been doing and our level of spending isn’t going to work anymore,” Becker told about two dozen people who gathered for a town hall campaign stop at the Astoria Hotel and Event Center in Dickinson

Becker, a Mandan plastic surgeon who was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2012, spoke for an hour about why he should be North Dakota’s next governor. He said he views himself as an “underdog” and a “non-establishment” candidate compared to state Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, who announced his candidacy in November and is viewed by most Republicans as the favorite to not only win their nomination, but also next November’s election.

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Tyler formation proved tough to tap into

Graphic courtesy of Timothy Nesheim, North Dakota Geological Survey

AMIDON — Hydraulic fracturing of the Tyler shale formation was expected to liven the sleepy plains of Slope County with oil activity.

But more than two years after the first well was spudded, three horizontal wells drilled by Marathon Oil Co. between September and December of 2013 have proven economically unfeasible and are now abandoned. A permit for a fourth well has been canceled.

The challenging geology of the play combined with the steep drop in oil prices kept Marathon from setting off another shale play in western North Dakota, said Timothy Nesheim, a subsurface geologist with the state Geological Survey.

Nesheim said the first two Tyler test wells “produced oil at rates too low to be economical at nearly any oil price.”

It’s a sharp change from September 2013, when Marathon estimated it could produce about 1.6 million barrels of oil equivalent from four test wells it had received permits to drill.

The wells produced 4,471 barrels of oil and 5.2 million cubic feet of natural gas, all of it coming from the Rundle Trust 29-21H and Powell 31-27TH wells, according to state Department of Mineral Resources Oil and Gas Division data.

Nesheim said the Rundle well — one of two drilled on a pad — had an initial 24-hour production rate of 88 barrels of oil per day and stabilized at just 7 bpd “for several months before it was plugged and abandoned.” By comparison, Bakken wells are producing an average of 117 barrels a day so far in 2015, according to Oil and Gas Division data.

Even at oil prices of $80 to $100 a barrel, the well’s production rate was about 5 to 10 percent of what it needed to be economical, he said.

“We had our hopes up. It looked good,” said Ken Urlacher, who farms and ranches on the Rundle land and takes care of the landowner’s cattle operation. “Obviously, if it didn’t look good, they wouldn’t have spent all the money in it and put the tanks on it.”

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62 miles of debate: Proposal to make Highway 85 four lanes through southern Bakken with excitement, questions

A semi truck hauling oil is followed by two vehicles on U.S. Highway 85 while going through the small town of Fairfi eld about 16 miles north of Interstate 94 on Saturday morning. A street sign denoting the highway was recently clipped by a vehicle and is now crooked.

FAIRFIELD, N.D. — Joe Kessel is blunt when he talks about a proposed project that would make U.S. Highway 85 four lanes from Interstate 94 to Watford City, N.D.

“Why haven’t they got it done yet?” he asks with a hearty laugh.

The Billings County Commissioner lives a half-mile off the well-traveled Bakken Oil Patch thoroughfare only about four miles south of the McKenzie County line and said he deals with oilfield traffic every day. He even believes the drop in oil prices over the past year hasn’t created that much of a slowdown along the highway.

The public will get a glimpse of the 62-mile project proposed by the North Dakota Department of Transportation for the first time this week when public scoping meetings are held at 5 p.m. Monday at Belfield City Hall and at 5 p.m. Tuesday at Watford City City Hall.

Jamie Olson, the NDDOT’s public information specialist, said there’s no telling how long the four-laning process would take, but said it could last upward of a decade. There’s also no dollar amount attached to the project yet, as it must go through multiple approval steps first.

“It’ll take a long time once they complete that environmental (assessment) portion of it,” she said. “That’ll help to answer some of those questions: How long are we looking at? What are the options?”

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Building through the bust: Southwest ND oilfield service company leaders say they’re using 2015 slowdown to improve their businesses

MBI Energy Services CEO and founder Jim Arthaud stands by one of his trucks on Oct. 8, 2015, at his company’s Belfield headquarters. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)

Jim Arthaud doesn’t look like a man at the helm of a multimillion-dollar oilfield services company.

Wearing a T-shirt and baseball cap with blue jeans, he sits in the office of his senior vice president and watches The Weather Channel while discussing the price of oil.

“Oil’s up today,” he says with a smile. “It’s about at $50. It’s only got $50 to go.”

The 60-year-old CEO and founder of MBI Energy Services follows that statement with a smile and laughter, knowing all too well the price for a barrel of crude oil isn’t doubling anytime soon.

That Arthaud can joke about the price of oil is a telling sign that not all is doom and gloom in the western North Dakota oilfields — at least not yet. Still, following eight years of substantial growth tied directly to the Bakken oil boom, Arthaud looks back on the past 10 months — a unique type of oil bust, as he puts it — and knows he should have seen these days coming.

“I’d say it surprised a lot of people and it surprised me,” he said. “It was definitely a dramatic downturn that a lot of people didn’t see. Obviously, the writing was on the wall. We all should have seen it.”

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