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By Advance Business Capital 
Jobs Aplenty, Wide Open Spaces.  Bring Your Own Sleeping Bag.

As winter grinds toward spring, the nation's economy keeps on sputtering.  Sure, we've had a tiny dip in the jobless rate. But are we seeing a trend, or simply a blip on the screen because snowstorms and power failures kept people from going out and filing new claims?

That's a moot question in North Dakota, where the economy's roaring and truckers are needed. At 4.4 percent, the unemployment rate is the nation's lowest. There are an estimated 8,500 unfilled jobs in virtually every category: motels, restaurants, hospitals and most of all, the oil fields.

Goin’ North to Git Them Jobs
Years ago, when John Wayne made a movie called North to Alaska, country singer Johnny Horton topped the charts with the title song and its toe-tapping refrain, “We’re goin’ north to Alaska! Goin’ north to git that gold!”

Now hardy fellows are heading north again, but this time to Dakota, and the gold they’re after is the black kind. This isn’t a new find. Oil was discovered here in the Bakken Formation back in 1951, but the region’s geology made extraction difficult and spotty. In 2006, new techniques and higher crude oil prices began changing the equation.

North Dakota trucker "Happy" (Harry) Kbischta has been rolling through these wide open spaces since 1969. "It doesn't get any better than driving around the Badlands," he says.  A good thing, for these days he puts in 12-hour stints, driving solo to at least six different wells, where he delivers a thousand barrels (about 42,000 gals.) of production water.

Trucking Boom
Trucked-in water and trucked-in sand are essential to “hydrofracking,” and hydrofracking is essential to this oil boom. Forced underground at high pressures, they separate the crude oil from layers of shale and dolomite.

Kbischta has seen plenty of booms and busts since he first started driving the oil fields.  He thinks this run is different, that production is strong and will continue. Drilling rigs, oil wells, gas flares and pipeline trenches are scattered in the wide open spaces.

Go online to any of the major national trucking job sites and you'll find plenty of listings for North Dakota. That's especially impressive when you remember that the entire population of the state is well under a million. 

Truck traffic has become so heavy that roads are torn up, accidents have skyrocketed and speed limits have had to be lowered. "Bout time," say many natives about these restrictions.  "Now they'll have to start enforcing those speed limits."

Not Jobless, Just Homeless 
How tight is housing?  Just look on Craigslist North Dakota (nd.craigslist.org) and you'll find that every posting under "Housing Wanted" tells a story. The deeper you go in Bakken country, the greater the urgency. "Family looking to relocate."  "$500 Sleeping room needed."  "$700 working man needs a place to stay."

Along with the boom has come an 18 percent jump in homelessness. Some newcomers hadn't researched and weren't qualified for the available jobs. Others, like Eric Cisneros, found a job but not a place to stay. He's toughing it out, sleeping in his truck. North Dakota, he says, is "probably the coldest place on the planet."

So if you’re thinking of heading north to Dakota, you might do well to wait, as some are, until temperatures rise to something approaching normal. The state's coldest recorded temperature was in the Bakken town of Parshall in February 1936. It was 60 degrees below zero.

This story was drawn from articles in USA Today, The Tallahassee Democrat, KFYR-TV, KXNET and The Bismarck Tribune.

This article is provided as a service for truckers and everyone in the trucking industry by Advance Business Capital. ABC is the first and only factoring service designed by truckers for truckers. We provide innovative financial solutions exclusively to For-Hire truckers and Freight Brokers and are proud to be the first factoring company to receive the P3 (Preferred Platinum Provider) endorsement from the Transportation Intermediaries Association.