WorldOil

Shale Tech: Bakken/Three Forks Infrastructure, takeaway woes only threats to high activity

Apart from an implausible oil price collapse, the only potential sidetracks to the continuation of unbridled exploration and production in the Bakken/Three Forks shale plays are an overwhelmed infrastructure and ever-growing logjams in moving production from fields to refineries. Industry and governmental officials, alike, warn that the besieged Bakken infrastructure may soon be completely overpowered. In an area where unemployment is a foreign statistic, once-bucolic ranch communities overnight have found themselves too heavily populated with incoming oilfield work to keep up with housing and other basic necessities. One service company executive described, as “dire,” the infrastructure issues in North Dakota, epicenter of the roughly 2,000-sq-mi inter-country play.