Montana town revels in oil boom

…Dotted around the farmland are hundreds of nodding-donkey oil wells which are strangely reminiscent of the kind of pumps you’d have seen in action during oil booms in Texas, California or Oklahoma a century ago.

The similarity is deceptive. The oil boom up on the Northern Great Plains is based on dramatic changes in drilling technology. Oil deposits beyond the reach of even the most modern pumps and drills 20 years ago are now viable.

Sidney – and plenty of other small towns like it on the Great Plains of North Dakota and Montana – sit on top of the shale reserves of the Bakken Formation. They were first discovered and mapped in the 1950s but back then there was no way of reaching them.

Now, new technologies are changing the definition of what is, and is not, a recoverable oil deposit.

The modern nodding-donkeys are sitting on top of a complex network of hi-tech pipes which bore down two miles into the earth’s crust then make a sharp right-angled turn and travel up to two miles horizontally into the oil-bearing shale.

Every so often, the light, sweet, crude has to be dislodged and flushed out with steam or water forced down under huge pressure.

BBC