(task) Fracking Boom: North Dakota Photos - POLITICO Magazine

USRS

4 cover

fracking, petrochemical political economy, climate change, methane

> http://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2015/10/north-dakota-fracking-photo-gallery-000530?slide=0 <http://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2015/10/north-dakota-fracking-photo-gallery-000530?slide=0>
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> The Face of the Fracking Boom
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> In the past few years, fracking towns in North Dakota have exploded in population; apartment rents in the oil-rich town of Williston were outpacing those in New York City and San Francisco; and per-capita spending in the state increased 28 percent from 2009 to 2012. But after months of steadily decreasing oil prices, the one-time boomtown has gone bust. The number of oil rigs operating in the state has decreased by 65 percent since last year, and oil jobs have taken a beating. Now, those rural outposts around the Bakken shale formation are starting to resemble pre-boom times, with a few traces of the prosperity that flourished there so recently, like the shells of $40 million-developments and a multi-million dollar state revenue shortfall.
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> In a new book of photographs of life along the hundredth meridian in the United States, photographer Andrew Moore captures the disruption the fracking boom created in this part of the country, which features broad, flat land, dryness, sandhills and “sunken homesteads,” in the words of novelist Kent Haruf, who wrote the preface for the book. After the loss of oil jobs and revenue, the future of this region of North Dakota is murky. But it is clear that the stillness of the sandhills and prairies has been irreversibly altered by an energy boom that no one saw coming, and no one predicted leaving so quickly.
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> Above, dilapidated farmsteads such as these are likely to house fracking workers given the lack of housing in surrounding areas.
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> (All photos from Dirt Meridian, published this week by Damiani.)
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> Andrew Moore