WILLISTON, N.D.—Josef McConnell, a tennis coach from Southern California, had been unemployed for a year after the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed his business. Then, in 2021, a friend told him that there were good-paying jobs to be had in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield.
He knew nothing of oilfields, had never heard of the Bakken Basin, and couldn’t, for that matter, even say much about North Dakota other than that he believed the state to be a cold, flat flyover tundra with corn and cows somewhere near Canada.
Mr. McConnell said that nevertheless, he “picked up everything and left; it was do-or-die.”
He quickly secured a job laboring at SandPro, a sand, wellhead, and automation management start-up in Berthold, North Dakota, west of Minot, North Dakota. As promised, good-paying jobs were available. As promised, they were muscle jobs, dirty jobs, and long-shift jobs.
Mr. McConnell was “cleaning iron, tearing things apart,” disassembling and rebuilding “frack trees” that cap fracked—hydraulically fractured—oil wells. It was hard, gritty work, 12 hours per day, for weeks at a time in an industrial beehive down the road and across the highway from downtown Berthold, a towering grain elevator looming as its landmark above bald grassy ridges and cottonwood-framed creek beds.
But the money was fantastic, and it dawned on him that “this could be a career, not just a job,” according to Mr. McConnell.
“I told myself that if I couldn’t make it through the first winter, this is not for me. I survived. It sucked, but I survived,” he said. “From there on, I tried to learn everything I could. I wanted to know how it worked, what it did. I cross-trained into all the aspects of the business.”
As SandPro grew, Mr. McConnell, 33, was appointed night-shift supervisor. Last December, he ascended to shop manager. In August 2023, he became a homeowner.
“I’d never be able to do that in California,” he said.
Although the 2006–14 Bakken Play shale boom is over and the days when oil rigs were anchored on the prairie like ships on seas of waving wheat are long gone, North Dakota’s oil industry has rebounded from its pandemic-induced slump. A sense of steadiness has settled in.
Right now, an able-bodied unskilled laborer willing to learn and capable of working long and hard can still land a $115,000 entry-level job with room and board and nearly five months off on an oil rig site or with a growing number of independent contractors and start-up oilfield service companies in western North Dakota.
Right now, the Bakken is where stories such as Mr. McConnell’s aren’t just stories but invitations. It’s where an Arizona cosmetologist can monitor a rig gate while looking to buy her first home, where a New Jersey geologist can build a company that employs 300 to revive a community where she’s hailed as a hometown hero, where a “disgruntled” airman from Cincinnati can carve a niche and expand it into a broadening entrepreneurial enterprise.
“The rush is over, and now we’re seeing a maturing of the play,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said. A 1998 graduate of Dickinson High School, he recalls having to—and being able to—stand in the middle of highways to get cellphone reception before the oil boom.
As is typical with a “maturing of the play,” most corporate players have moved on. In their wake, new players have emerged: first-time independent contractors and serial entrepreneurs, many younger than 40, most building local businesses, buying homes, starting families, and growing communities.
For them, fast money is fine, but sustainable “systemic growth” is preferable, with perfected-in-North-Dakota advances in fracking spurring pioneering innovations in lateral drilling.
“This is a time of great technological advancements,” North Dakota Petroleum Council President Ron Ness said.
The 31 rigs operating in North Dakota in late December 2023 were pumping 1.25 million barrels of shale oil per day to nearly 19,000 wells, a per-rig production that’s “a vast improvement” over past proficiency benchmarks, he said.
With lateral drilling in the Bakken expected to extend beyond four miles by early 2024, “the timeline to drill wells has been compressed” and “opened up a whole new area of the Bakken than was formerly known.”
Post-Boom Boon
Spearheading the Bakken’s post-boom boon are “smaller companies,” according to Mr. Ness.“We’ve got so many, typically led by younger people who were working for these larger international service companies, found a niche, and started their own businesses,” he said.
With oil prices expected to hover in the $70 to $85 per barrel “sweet spot,” demand for North Dakota oil is projected to grow moderately for the foreseeable future.
“It’s better than the boom,” SandPro Vice President Joshua Blackaby said. “You want steady work and that’s where we’re at right now. And one of the distinctive things about what’s going on here now is it’s a lot of small companies, a lot of entrepreneurs.”
According to the North Dakota Job Service, the 31 rigs directly employ 50,000 people, with about 35,000 working in field and technical services and about 15,000 toiling directly on sites.
As of mid-December 2023, more than 3,000 oilfield-related jobs were vacant.
For the small farming and ranching prairie towns overwhelmed during the boom, infill ambitions spur new commercial construction, revitalized main streets, and growing schools, with new homes being purchased by 20- and 30-something-year-olds.
“Building schools, building homes, growing communities rather than tearing them down? I think there’s lots of success stories here,” Mr. Ness said.
Mr. Armstrong said, “Now, you have an opportunity to grow a life. That’s a story we are proud to tell.”
For the independent-inclined, there’s ample opportunity for enterprise, according to Mr. Blackaby.
In the Field
Julie Byron, 33, from Tucson, Arizona, is working in a gate shack with two heaters at her feet. Only those on the crew can gain entry to the Hess rig without checking in with her.A cosmetologist “doing pull-tabs at the Legion,” she had lived in Williston, North Dakota, since 2013 but never considered working in the Bakken until a manager suggested that she apply for a job with Neset Consulting Services, a Tioga, North Dakota-based company that provides gate monitors, roustabout crews, field medics, mud-loggers, and geologists for oil rig sites.
Since August 2023, she has been working seven days on and seven days off in shifts tailored to her needs as a single mother.
It’s fascinating, Ms. Byron said. “This is the first time I’m seeing what’s really going on. I said to myself, ‘OK, we’re going to learn this. We’re going to turn this into an opportunity,’” she said. “It’s cool to know the background—the geology, infrastructure, the different jobs—and understand it.”
She said she’s looking to buy a home in 2024. She still works as a cosmetologist and does pull-tabs at the Legion during off-weeks.
“It’s just me starting over. I’m still figuring this out at 33 years old,” Ms. Byron said. “Was it worth it? One hundred percent.”
Ron Budd, 34, delivery services coordinator for Minot-based Creedence Energy Services’ Williston office, moved from Phoenix to North Dakota in 2010 when his stepfather got a job with Haliburton.
“I was pretty young and didn’t really have it figured out. I was just kind of day-by-day, dead-end jobs,” Mr. Budd said. “The job I was working before I came up here was at McDonald’s. I thought of it as hard work. Now, not so much.”
He said “financial opportunity” became his “driving force to fully commit” to the oilfield. He no longer works directly in the field, but the commitment has panned out.
“Knowing I could do better for my kids than what I had, knowing that I can have things that no one else in my family has, I buckled down and committed,” Mr. Budd, father of two, said, noting he has purchased his own home. “Out of my immediate family, I’m the only one that owns a home.”
On the Rigs
Among the hands, there’s a hierarchy topped by the tool-pusher. Often called “the company man,” the tool-pusher is generally followed in the chain of command by the driller, derrick hands (roughnecks), pit hands, and then motor hands.At the bottom are floor hands, the roustabouts, a mix that can include novice gofers and indispensable jacks-of-all-oilfield-trades.
Rocko Mackade, 23, of Pierz, Minnesota, on Dec. 21, 2023, was on day 32 of a 44-day stint working for Chord Energy at the Patterson 806 rig and living in an eight-trailer man camp 15 miles east of Williston.
He had owned a custom metal roofing company, he said, and maybe he’ll do that again, but he doesn’t regret finding work in the Bakken two years ago.
“Why? The money. I like to work, so if I like to work, I might as well get the most I can out of it—$140,000 a year does that,” Mr. Mackade said.
James Harmon, 25, of Seville, Ohio, a solids control consultant who manages and monitors drilling fluids to ensure shell, rock, and debris don’t impede flow to Paterson 806’s wells, has worked six years in oilfields.
“I read online you could make good money and get two weeks off for your weekend,” he said.
That was that. After high school, Mr. Harmon was gone.
“It’s easier than it used to be,” he said. “They say it’s safer, but it’s—the easier it gets, the more complacency there is.”
Riley Kuntz, 40, did “a little bit of everything” before finding a job on a rig seven years ago, the last four as a Patterson 806 derrick hand.
In 2022, he challenged former governor and two-term Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) in the GOP primary, garnering nearly 22 percent of the tally against a household-name incumbent.
Mr. Kuntz ran because he “[didn’t] like the way the government is run,” saying he ran a “really low-budget campaign, not well-planned, pretty reactionary” but was “never going to make a career out of it” anyway—unlike Mr. Hoeven, he said.
To be successful in the oilfield and in politics, Mr. Kuntz said, “you just got to work and get dirty.”
The Independent Contractor
Dallas Moore had wanted to be roughneck since he was a teenager in Wyoming.“The cool guys pulling up in big shiny trucks, the guys who had the prettiest girlfriends—they were the roughnecks,” he said.
But getting onto a rig was easier said than done in Wyoming in 2004.
“You'd go into [state employment office], write your name on a paper with your experience and phone number. They’d fax it to all the rigs every Friday morning,” Mr. Moore said.
He had no experience.
“I had been putting my name on that list for about six months. Never got a call,” Mr. Moore said.
And so he claimed that he had two years’ experience as a derrick hand.
“Three days later, I got a call. They said, ‘You’ve got a job. Start tomorrow,’” Mr. Moore said. “Then they asked, ‘You don’t, by chance, know a ’motor head?’ Well, my roommate was passed out on the couch next to me. He looked like a ’motor head' to me so, I said: ‘I sure do. I know a real good ’motor-head’ and got him a job, too.”
He arrived for his first day of work knowing his bluff would be exposed.
“The company man pointed me to this big rig,” Mr. Moore said. “There was a staircase, 40 stairs going up. It was the most unreal thing I’d ever seen.
“I walked up those stairs and met the driller. I said, ‘I lied. I’m not a roughneck. I don’t even know what a roughneck is, but I‘ll work my butt off.’ The driller said, ‘Well, you put me in a bind, but I’ll let you stay.’ I worked my butt off for him for three years.”
He worked as a roughneck from 2005 to 2011 in Wyoming, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and North Dakota. In 2011, he became a certified tree climber and established a tree-trimming business.
“I used to walk on trees,” he said. “Did that for three years in Colorado.”
During that time, he also earned a Class A commercial driver’s license but set aside plans to “do the truck driver thing” when he learned of the emerging field of solids control in dealing with drilling fluids and preventing blowouts.
As with many fellow oilfield workers, Mr. Moore, 38, a father of three, is incorporated as an independent contractor. He’s president and CEO of Matrix Oilfield LLC.
“I work for my own company,” he said. “The pay is phenomenal. I make a daily base rate of $800.”
The Entrepreneur
Mr. Blackaby was studying to be a pilot at the University of Cincinnati when he “kind of ran out of money” and enlisted in the Air Force.“I went to basic training and to tech school and applied for everywhere overseas,“ he said. ”I got my orders, and I'll never forget how that dream came to an end when it said ‘nuclear missile technician, Minot, North Dakota.’”
The young airman “came up here kind of disgruntled, getting sent to North Dakota.” But as it turned out, it was the best thing that ever happened to him, he said.
Mr. Blackaby completed his bachelor’s and earned a master’s in aviation safety while in the Air Force, all aimed at “getting the hell out of North Dakota” when his enlistment was over.
But life unravels even the best-laid plans. He got married and now has a daughter.
“So I stayed when I got out, ended up getting into oil and gas,“ said Mr. Blackaby, 42. ”My daughter is now 17 years old.”
He joined fellow Air Force buddies who were “roughnecking and making a lot of money” as a floor hand in 2008. When a supervisor learned Mr. Blackaby had a master’s in aviation safety, he sent him to see his boss.
“It was during the boom, 2009 to 2010. He hired me on the spot as EHS [environmental, health, and safety] supervisor” for Hess, he said.
In January 2019, Mr. Blackaby and “some guys,” including a cousin, raised $50,000 to establish SandPro LLC based on a seminal sand-filtration innovation.
“When they frack wells, they push all that sand and water with high pressure down into the ground. When they get done fracking with all that pressure and start pulling the well, a lot of that sand comes back up,” he said.
SandPro brought the first sand filter for fracked wells to market.
“We didn’t invent it, but we got the exclusive technology from it,” Mr. Blackaby said. “We didn’t know if it was going to work. We went out and it worked and we knew we had something.”
Yet SandPro nearly died in its second year when COVID-19 hit.
“I thought it was lost when oil dropped to minus $38 bucks a barrel. All drilling, all activity, stopped,” he said.
Doubt haunted him.
“I was out on location, going, ‘I left these wonderful jobs, and what did I get myself into?’” Mr. Blackaby said.
“We were able to tighten our belt, survive on nothing. ... We came out of COVID-19 stronger than before.”
SandPro has expanded into wellhead and automation applications. It had a 2023 summer peak of 130 employees, with 100 working 10-hour-per-day, five-day weeks in December 2023 in anticipation of gearing up by March and fielding a 150-employee workforce by summer.
The company’s bread-and-butter is “frack stacks,” wellhead caps that are “Lego pieces that weigh thousands and thousands of pounds” that “guys are putting together using hydraulic torque wrenches,” according to Mr. Blackaby.
SandPro workers haven’t suffered a workplace injury beyond pinched fingers since its founding, he said.
“Safety keeps me up most at night,” Mr. Blackaby said. “These are bombs. They have 10,000 PSI running through them—60 PSI will kill you. If not put together right, I’ve seen iron break apart and shoot thousands of pounds football fields away. It’s got to be perfect. There’s no room for error.”
North Dakota continues to surprise him, he said.
“It’s winter right now, but in the summer, it’s the most beautiful place in the world,” he said. “I mean, North Dakota, it’s just a jewel up here. There’s nothing like the opportunities here. There really isn’t.”
