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Oil Prospects Inject New Life Into North Dakota Town

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The Associated Press

Published: November 10, 2008

PARSHALL, N.D. - In this tiny reservation town a hundred miles from the Canadian border where temperatures once hit 60 below zero, a Southern twang is sometimes heard over the din at the local diner and there is talk of Texas tea beneath the streets.

Roughnecks from Texas and Oklahoma have traveled here on hopes they now share with the town's 1,000 or so inhabitants - that there is oil in Parshall.

About 400 people own mineral rights under homes, businesses, churches, nursing homes or tribal land. All of it has been leased, town officials said.

"We were dying," said Loren Hoffman, a local farmer and the city auditor. "Our town was slipping backward, but now we're on the upswing."

While it is the namesake of the Parshall oil field, which sits in the crude-rich Bakken shale formation, a quarter of Parshall's residents live in poverty.

No one is sure how much oil might lie beneath the town, but with the wells spreading south toward Parshall near the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, things have begun to change.

"We're seeing an influx of youth that we didn't have before," Hoffman said.

Business at Parshall's only restaurant, the Redwood, like other establishments in town, is brisk. The hamburger smothered with gravy is still a big seller.

"We put breakfast burritos on the menu and no one would try them - they thought it would be too spicy," said Shad Green, 39, who came to the area last spring from Texas to work the oil wells for $32 an hour.

After a co-worker was killed on an oil rig where he worked, Green quit the business and bought the Redwood.

Green, his wife and her mother, sister and 18-year-old niece are there, and his son and daughter-in-law expect to move there in about a month, to help work in the restaurant, he said.

A number of businesses are reporting record sales, said Parshall Mayor Richard Bolkan, who also owns the town grocery store.

Occupancy is nearly at 100 percent at the 15-room Parshall Motor Inn, said owner and manager Jeanette Cecil.

In just over a year, horizontal oil wells have been spudded throughout the region, where the hilly prairie had been previously disturbed only by crops and Cold War-era missile silos.

Dozens of nodding donkey pumps now dot the landscape and flames from waste gas light the night sky.

In April, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from the Bakken. The agency said the Bakken, much of which lies two miles under the surface in western North Dakota, was the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

Wichita, Kan.-based Slawson Exploration Co. has begun drilling on the outskirts of Parshall, and another well is planned this month that will partially drill beneath the town, said Todd Slawson, one of the company's owners. Next year, a rig will likely drill directly beneath the town, he said.

The city is leasing land at $500 an acre, plus royalties. Individuals are getting paid about $85 a lot, which is about one-sixth of an acre, Hoffman said.

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