WILLISTON, North Dakota—In an eight-trailer mancamp tucked into a frosted fold of rolling prairie above an ice-laced lake, Chord Energy’s derrick hands, roughnecks, and roustabouts were ready for Christmas.
For them, it would be another Monday, another 12-hour shift, another day of drilling two miles deep and three miles wide below the 3-acre Patterson 806 rig, where fracked shale oil is siphoned into surface wells to the ceaseless cadence of pumpjacks—their mallet-nosed horse heads hammering air on snow-spotted slopes shared with grazing Black Angus cattle.
