The Bakken Shale in North Dakota is poised to become a behemoth of natural gas and oil production. The Bakken Shale is attracting oil and gas workers in droves, those who are hoping to make it big there, just as the Barnett Shale and Eagle Ford Shale in Texas have done and continue to do.
In fact, the Bakken Shale might just become the second largest producer, second only to the mighty Texas shale plays, as James Vlahos writes for Popular Mechanics, meaning that the 25,000 square-mile region is about to get a whole lot busier.
Texas has for some time been enjoying the benefits of hydraulic fracturing, which cuts through the hard shale. Though, like the Bakken Shale, it hasn’t been enjoying it for very long. This means that we’ve likely got years ahead of us in terms of oil and gas production.
This assumption squares with what a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper said in the post we wrote earlier this week: that there’s been double and triple the amounts of traffic and that the oil companies aren’t going anywhere for awhile.
In the years to come, it’s likely that the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas will continue to produce the most oil and gas in the U.S. Coming in second will be the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. We’ll have to wait and see whether these efforts will lead to energy independence, as Vlahos wonders.
Source: Oil Boom: North Dakota is the Next Hub of U.S. Energy