A Texas oil firm will be tapping an oil reserve in western North Dakota.
Marathon Oil is the fourth largest oil company in the United States, and today the company opened an office in Dickinson.
Marathon Oil recently purchased a 200,000 acre piece of land in western North Dakota and eastern Montana.
Steve Guidry with Marathon Oil says the company will be drilling about 300 wells in the next five years.
He says when drilling is complete, the eight rigs will produce about 20-thousand barrels of oil a day.
(Steve Guidry, Marathon Oil) “Each of those rigs will generate about 120 additional jobs, both direct hire and indirect hire. And in addition to that we’re bringing in 25 employees who will live in Dickinson and manage our drilling and production operations.”
Eight rigs with about 120 workers per rig is 960 jobs. That is quite a shot in the arm for North Dakota’s economy.
Meanwhile, North Dakota’s liberals are castigating a Republican for daring to give the oil industry tax incentives that would have encouraged this very type of growth. These same liberals complain all the time about a “lack of opportunity” in North Dakota’s job economy. They talk about the need to “create” high-paying, highly-skilled jobs. Well here’s about 960 “good” jobs (though I’d argue that all jobs are good jobs) coming to the state and all it took was a business-friendly government...and some high gas prices.
But regardless, this just proves a point about liberals. They think the way to “create” jobs is to mandate higher wages and saddle businesses with all sorts of taxes and regulations. The real way you attract jobs (government can’t create them) is buy having a business-friendly government. That’s it.
That’s all it takes.