You may have heard that North Dakota is producing a lot more oil. Yeah, they've got a real boom up there.
Earl Pomeroy is the at-large member of the House of Representatives from North Dakota. Somebody in Washington told me once that we had to get him on Platts Energy Week, because he's in this odd position of being a Democrat from a state that is suddenly very much a member of the oil patch, and also is quite colorful. He never has appeared as a guest, but maybe in the future.
Of course, if we got him on, it's questionable whether he'd talk about oil.
Take a look at this website on his re-election campaign. Yes, he makes reference to the "booming" oil flow from the Bakken formation. But that's it; no other references anywhere else on the page.
But the page does have the requisite picture of a windmill. And it's got reference to all the wind that blows across the North Dakota prairies. And it's got talk of ethanol, and all the help he's given that industry.
But oil? The one mention.
It's said that North Dakota has more millionaires per capita than any other state in the union. They didn't get that way because of wind or ethanol or biodiesel. They got there because the state's output is now at a half million barrels per day (not all Bakken, but a lot of it), and it's not slowing down. People are sleeping in their cars near Williston not because they're poor, but because they've come to get great-paying jobs in the oil patch and the housing supply hasn't caught up with the demand.
Why not tout that over wind and ethanol? I don't need to look at any data to make a firm statement: the amount of energy coming out of the Bakken compared to the amount of energy coming from wind and ethanol in North Dakota is a ratio big enough to drive a drilling rig through. That will never change.
Rep. Pomeroy appears to be very much behind in the polls. I guess we won't get him on Platts Energy Week after all.
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