Oliver does his standard hilarious investigation of the oil boom’s many excesses here, but does not touch on the current crash going on in this gold rush economy. It’s a scenario the fracking industry hopes to bring to a place near you, soon.
Halliburton Co, the world’s No. 2 oilfield services provider, said on Monday it has laid off staff in Williston, North Dakota, blaming plunging crude oil prices.
The company provided no details on the number of employees affected.
“Halliburton will continue to monitor the business environment and will adjust the size of our workforce to align with current business demands as needed,” the company said in an emailed statement to Reuters.
Dickinson (North Dakota) Press:
Baker Hughes sent a letter of notice to Dickinson Mayor Dennis Johnson on Wednesday, stating it was permanently terminating 117 employees here — most of them field operators and specialists.
In the letter, Baker Hughes stated that falling oil prices “have negatively impacted the market and reduced the overall need for the services provided by Baker Hughes.”
The Work Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires companies that plan to terminate more than 100 employees alert area and state workforce services, as well as the mayor of the city where the layoffs occur. Baker Hughes did not release how many workers it still employs at its Dickinson office.
Johnson said, in his 15 years as the city commission’s president, he cannot remember receiving a similar letter.
“Historically, at least for quite a while, there haven’t been any layoffs of that magnitude,” he said.
Chain saws and staple guns echo across a $40 million residential complex under construction in Williston, North Dakota, a few miles from almost-empty camps once filled with oil workers.
After struggling to house thousands of migrant roughnecks during the boom, the state faces a new real-estate crisis: The frenzied drilling that made it No. 1 in personal-income growth and job creation for five consecutive years hasn’t lasted long enough to support the oil-fueled building explosion.
Civic leaders and developers say many new units were already in the pipeline, and they anticipate another influx of workers when oil prices rise again. But for now, hundreds of dwellings approved during the heady days are rising, skeletons of wood and cement surrounded by rolling grasslands, with too few residents who can afford them.
“We are overbuilt,” said Dan Kalil, a commissioner in Williams County in the heart of the Bakken, a 360-million-year-old shale bed, during a break from cutting flax on his farm. “I am concerned about having hundreds of $200-a-month apartments in the future.”