Tag: oil

Survey says …

We asked. You answered. The Press survey results show readers have mixed feelings on the boom’s impact; feel Dickinson is a worse place than it was 5 years ago.  

The oil boom has changed Dickinson and southwest North Dakota’s way of life — and a majority of people don’t like it, according to a Dickinson Press survey.

Of the 1,310 readers who voted in the survey online or through the newspaper over the last two weeks, 57 percent said they don’t believe the area is a better place than it was five years ago. Sixty-four percent have mixed feelings on the energy industry’s impact on the area, saying it has brought a combination of good and bad impacts.

In response to the survey’s results, Dickinson Mayor Dennis Johnson said he understands there is a “significant minority” who have been negatively impacted by the oil boom, whether it’s because of increased housing costs, a higher cost of living or everyday issues, such as dealing with increased traffic or longer lines at the grocery store.

“In general, what’s happening here is good,” Johnson said. “But it isn’t good for everybody.”

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$80K worth of oil stolen in Dunn County

KILLDEER — A Dunn County roustabout service is estimating that $80,000 worth of crude oil was stolen from tanks it maintains at two well sites north of Dunn Center.
Greg Krueger, the owner of K&R Roustabout, said he reported the theft of about 760 barrels of oil to the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office on July 1.

“Somebody is going in there and taking oil,” Krueger said.

Cornerstone Natural Resources owns the wells, but Krueger said a K&R pumper was the first to raise a red flag after the amount of oil calculated in tanks at two different sites came up short and didn’t match truck tickets.

Under North Dakota law, the theft would be considered a Class B felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a fine of $10,000, or both.

Krueger said throughout the past two weeks, he has been “disheartened” by the effort being put into the investigation by the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office. He said no one responded to his initial report until July 4.

“It bummed me out that the guys aren’t taking it serious,” Krueger said.

Dunn County Sheriff Clay Coker said his office is investigating the alleged theft, adding theft is the most probable answer to the missing oil because a seal to one tank was missing and a seal at another was broken. The sheriff’s office is unsure of the exact dates the thefts occurred, but they are believed to have occurred over a weekend, Coker said.

Krueger said he thinks the thefts happened at night, adding that the well sites where the tanks are located are in secluded, rough terrain areas near the Little Missouri State Park.

K&R has set up motion-activated cameras typically used for monitoring wildlife at well sites, Krueger said, to help prevent further losses.

“We just hope to hell they come back and we catch them on the game cam,” Krueger said. “I’d like to catch them. They’re going to go to jail for a long time.”

North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources spokeswoman Alison Ritter said her office’s production audit department is aware of missing oil and is doing their part to help the investigation.

“Like anything else, it’s a valuable property,” Ritter said. “But the big thing where we would come in is if we could look at other run tickets we receive, and if anything seems off where we could provide a lead, we could do that.”

Grain train issues will only get worse

On Wednesday, I made a quick trip to Southwest Grain’s Boyle Terminal between Taylor and Gladstone to take a photo of Delane Thom, the cooperative’s manager. He had been interviewed for a national story by Reuters titled “Grain trains scarce on the Plains,” that we ran Thursday on our front page.

I spent 15 minutes chatting with Thom about the issues facing elevators throughout North Dakota, particularly those out west in the Oil Patch areas. I came away with an even better understanding of what people like those in Thom’s position are facing as they head into another busy season, trying to appease producers tired of hearing that an elevator with millions of bushels of space has no room and then begging BNSF Railway to send a few more trains their way to help free up space, only to watch a train hauling 110 cars full of oil roll east past the facility.

So much attention is being paid to those train cars carrying Bakken oil and its volatility that most forget about the issues facing local grain cooperatives throughout the region.

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There’s no place like Watford City

Nothing in America compares to what’s happening right now in Watford City. It’s as simple as that.

As Williston gets the headlines and Dickinson sees the benefits of the Bakken oil boom while not having to deal with the truly dirty side of it, Watford City is stuck right in the middle of it all — “the epicenter” of the biggest shale oil play in American history, as McKenzie County Economic Development Director Gene Veeder put it.

Most of the talk about Watford City in the past couple years has been about the bypass to send Highway 85’s heavy truck traffic around the city. Lately, we learned of a company in Watford City improperly disposing of radioactive filter socks.

But to truly understand what’s happening on the ground, you have to sit down and speak to the city’s leaders.

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Sculpting success: Oil boom helps Dickinson native’s welding business take off

Mike Gayda stands outside of the Iron Works Welding shop in north Dickinson.

Mike Gayda tried going to college.

After attending Dickinson State University for a short time he acknowledged, “College wasn’t for me.”

So, knowing he had a talent for welding, he took jobs with Steffes Corp. in Dickinson and at the Case IH Steiger plant in Fargo. It was at the latter that the Dickinson native had a chance conversation with a co-worker who tipped him off about welders running their own service trucks in the burgeoning western North Dakota oil fields.

So, in 2006, Gayda decided to move home and start his own business.

“It was perfect timing,” Gayda said.

When he was 20 years old, Gayda started Iron Works Welding with one service truck. He worked out of a heatless quonset on Dickinson’s south side by himself.

By 2008, before the true onset of the oil boom, he had found enough work to hire two employees and build a 6,800 square-foot building on a little less than an acre of land on a space just north of Dickinson in the industrial park off Highway 22.

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