How shale heartland avoided an oil bust

As the price of oil goes, so goes Williston, N. D. Now, though, the community located deep in the state’s Bakken shale play is working to break free from the industry’s boom-and-bust cycles.

When oil sold for US$100 a barrel, Williston — one of many oil towns dotting the U. S. shale basins — grew faster than its infrastructure and services could handle. There was a housing shortage, a too- small police force and endless traffic tie-ups.

Then the bust hit with oil prices falling below US$ 30 and Williston lost around 4,000 residents in just a year as the industry responded with massive layoffs. Bad news? Not according to some. Even as the population fell, school enrolment and birth rates rose, adding incentives to improve infrastructure and services as Williston veered away from a population heavy with transient workers to one with a more settled populace.

The goal: Keep existing businesses happy while prepping for what was seen as an inevitable oil revival, according to Shawn Wenko, executive director of Williston Economic Development. “We shifted from a boom to a business model,” he said. “And today you see that mindset is paying off.”

Since 2015, as oil prices floundered, Williston has added new roads, two new fire stations, expanded the landfill, opened a new wastewater treatment plant and started work on an airport relocation and expansion project. And school officials are studying whether to quickly add another 15 rooms to the high school as enrolment rates continue to grow. Public school enrolment jumped 49 per cent in the past five years.

In essence, the community was able to take a deep breath and get reorganized during the industry slowdown, Wenko said. The timing is key. With oil prices now above US$ 60 a barrel and the Dakota Access Pipeline in service, explorers are rediscovering the value of the Bakken as prices for oil development in Texas and New Mexico have skyrocketed.

“We definitely noticed an uptick of activity” starting in the third quarter of 2017, Wenko said. “There’s a tremendous amount of people coming back through the doors.”

When Williston lost population, those who remained represented a new demographic as jobs weren’t necessarily tied to oil. They stayed even as economic times got tougher, basically because they liked the community. Meanwhile, town officials used the three- year oil rout to gear up community services, said David Tuan, the city administrator.

“Williston was definitely a boom and bust city,” Tuan said. “But what happened with this last period, over the past three to four years, was that we didn’t really see a bust. We just saw a slow decline.”