US oil production has been booming the past few years, due in large part to North Dakota’s Bakken formation, a rock layer tapped through fracking. Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.
As a journalist digging into the long-term potential for shale oil—how much oil it might supply, and at what economic and environmental costs—I wanted to create a map showing the extent of this drilling boom to help me look for trends. In this post, I’ll explain how I did that, but first I want to say why this matters.
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How long can North Dakota’s boom continue? And how will it fare if oil prices remain around their current relatively low price, of about $50 a barrel? It could be that companies have stopped drilling in some areas, or started drilling in new areas. It could be that they’re drilling at much higher density in areas that are particularly attractive—especially since oil prices have dropped drastically over the past six months. Tracking how many wells have been drilled in recent months, and where they’ve been drilled, could show how companies are responding to lower oil prices. I wanted to do this to supplement my own reporting, but also to let anybody who’s interested explore the data more easily.