03/09/10 Gaithersburg, Maryland – You know the labor market is tight when the local McDonald’s starts handing out $300 signing bonuses. Workers are coming in from all over, making it tough to find housing. They might sleep in their trucks or pitch tents, but it can get 50 degrees below zero, which makes such a move dangerous.
There is also a chronic shortage of hotel rooms. I browsed the Web to see if I could find a room. I checked the Super 8 motel – no rooms available. I checked a few others – no rooms there, either. I used Priceline to search, and there were no rooms available. What’s going on here?
Local ranchers are becoming millionaires overnight. The 4 Bears Casino reported a 60% increase in sales last year. This is a boomtown. Or boomtowns. Even the state government is in surplus.
The above is a composite of what’s going in North Dakota, around the Bakken Shale formation. As The Wall Street Journal put it: “A massive oil reserve buried two miles underground has put North Dakota at the center of a revolution in the US oil industry, a shift that has radically altered the fortunes of this remote area.”
The Bakken Shale could hold more than 4 billion barrels of oil and stretches under North Dakota and Montana (and Canada, but I’m only talking about the US piece, here). If that number is correct – it comes from the US Geological Survey – then it would be the biggest oil field discovered in the contiguous US in more than 40 years…
In February 2008, we picked up shares of Kodiak Oil & Gas (AMEX:KOG), a small Bakken player, for $1.94 per share. By June, they traded for over $4 per share. So you can make good money speculating on the Bakken.
Chris Mayer
for The Daily Reckoning
Chris Mayer
Chris Mayer is managing editor of the Capital and Crisis and Mayer’s Special Situations newsletters. Graduating magna cum laude with a degree in finance and an MBA from the University of Maryland, he began his business career as a corporate banker. Mayer left the banking industry after ten years and signed on with Agora Financial. His book, Invest Like a Dealmaker, Secrets of a Former Banking Insider, documents his ability to analyze macro issues and micro investment opportunities to produce an exceptional long-term track record of winning ideas.
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Sooooo 4 billion barrels is just what the US needs to solve its problems and get out of the deep doodoo??!! eh?
In 2007 the US used 20 million barrels a day.
4 billion / 20 Million
= 200 days of oil.
All announcements of new oil reserves should be qualified by either “days in US use terms i.e 200 days of oil just found in Dakota!” or perhaps a world use extrapoliation (we use 86 million barrels a day(ish))
i.e The entire Bakken would supply the world for only 46 days….
Ouch. Me thinks “Oil and Crunch” are two words we will be hearing a lot of in the next few years…
Fred, very true, but people of industrialized nations the world over are still on an intravenous oil drip and like any crack/heroine/you name it/addict they are still going to great lengths to get their next fix and have become even physically dependent on the drug. So if you’re into that sort of thing it might be a convenient way to make money by helping to invest more in the infrastructure of the oil lords.
What the heck is wrong with oil?
It comes from the ground so nature manufactures it. SO IT’S GREEN! I don’t agree with this “Fossil Fuel” jargon. The largest oil Discovery to date is Titan…A moon of Saturn! So unless Dino et al did space travel,,, forget it.
It is less expensive than anything else we have to date. The Carbon and Global Warming crap is just that,,,crap.
Your supposed GREEN technology is more fake science. Without stealing from your fellow citizens (taxes) it would require two lifetimes to break even with the solar systems of today. Whats really sick is you see these GREEN goblygooks running around in their stupid useless vehicles (SUV’s) or worse Limos, flying from here to there, using the air and heat supplied by OIL telling everyone else ‘we are’ addicted to oil… ROFLOL
Oh,,, KOG hasn’t seen those 4-5 dollar highs since 2008. It’s around $2.95 presently. With the world supposedly going into depression wouldn’t “oil” prices go down since usage would decrease?
Sorry for the rant….
did u ever think we have only turned to alternative energy for the simple fact that there is a much higher demand over seas for our troops. alternative energy is the reason we r not in a full blown depression right now. do u have any clue how many more jobs where created since alternative energies have been introduced since this so called war started. the govenment is so good at covering there ass it isnt funny. oil will always be used here in this country eventually it will be back down to the prices we had in the 80s. all in time u watch and see!