(FOX BUSINESS) – “For the last, let’s say, 12, 14 years, we’ve been in catch-up mode around here – a lot,” Williston Mayor Howard Klug told FOX Business. “What do you do with all the sewage when you double the population and you don’t have any place to put it?”
The mayor’s rather unique concern was the result of one of the biggest economic booms of the past decade: fracking in North Dakota’s Bakken Formation.
In the late 2000s, fracking and horizontal drilling made previously difficult to tap oil, trapped in the underground rock formation, accessible. The yearly oil production in North Dakota went from 45 million barrels in 2007 to nearly 525 million in 2019. North Dakota is now second only to Texas in oil production in the U.S.
