The oil patch swings with the world price of crude, and the plains have learned to live with a prosperity that can double the rigs one year and idle them the next.
There is no steadier truth in the oil patch than its instability. The number of rigs turning across the western counties tracks the world price of crude with grim fidelity — flush and frantic when the price is high, hushed and idled when it falls. The plains have ridden this wave through several full cycles now, and have learned its temper.
The Wave the West Rides
A bust is not merely fewer rigs. It is a laid-off crew, a half-empty apartment block, a café that loses its lunch rush, a county whose tax receipts fall as fast as they once rose. The boom's wealth is real, but it arrives and departs on a schedule set in distant markets far beyond the plains' control.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Active rig counts track the world price of crude closely.
- Busts idle crews and cut the tax receipts of oil counties.
- Prudent communities bank boom-year revenue against the inevitable downturn.
The wiser communities have used the fat years to bank against the lean — paving roads, building schools, salting money away. The almanac counsels the oil country to remember, in every boom, that the bust is not a question of whether but of when.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Roughneck's Trade on the Bakken Rig
On drilling floors across the west, the roughnecks work the pipe in long shifts through heat and cold, in one of the hardest and best-paid trades the plains have to offer.
Carbon Capture Comes to the Lignite Country
Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
Produced Water: The Oil Patch's Other Flood
For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.